ContextThis paper examines how a long-running Educational Leadership EdD at a public California State University redesigned itself for liberatory leadership preparation. Cohort-based and built for working educators across early childhood, TK-12, community college, and community organization settings, the program entered its second decade with steady enrollment and high completion rates, yet its founding Mission, Vision, and Program Learning Outcomes had drifted into an older accountability register that no longer matched a majority-BIPOC, majority-women student body or the program's commitments to justice, critical theory, and practitioner inquiry. Rather than treating stability as a reason to leave well enough alone, the program used it to renegotiate its formal contract from a discourse of accountability toward one of abolition, epistemic justice, and humanizing systems.Approach and ContributionWritten from the inside by faculty and program leaders, the paper traces this redesign through governance, theory, and evidence. It offers a discourse comparison of the program's original and revised documents; an emergent Theory of Liberatory Leadership Development built on two spheres, Liberatory Leadership and Liberatory Agency, with emotional labor between them; and an Educational Design Research study drawing on interviews with 26 alumni across fourteen cohorts. It closes with implications for institutionalizing commitments as governance and operationalizing them as artifacts, including a renamed First-Year Inquiry Project, redesigned dissertation and multimedia materials, and an instructor syllabus-alignment rubric. Attendees will leave with a transferable approach to aligning a program's stated commitments with the structures that determine whether those commitments endure.
