By: Natalie Johnson
Many professionals who become disillusioned with traditional institutions complain from within. Christine E. Ohenewah did something different: she built an alternative.
After working in white collar criminal defense at McGuireWoods LLP and teaching at three universities simultaneously, Ohenewah had every credential necessary for a conventional academic or legal career. Cornell Law J.D., master’s degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago, research fellowships at Harvard and Oxford. Yet she recognized that existing structures couldn’t accommodate the type of intellectual work she wanted to create.
So she founded The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation (ETF), designing it as a next-generation university centered on power literacy and legal-humanistic thinking. It’s an audacious project that raises a fundamental question: if you find that traditional education isn’t teaching what people actually need to understand, do you try to reform it from within or start over?
Ohenewah chose the latter, but not as a rejection of academia itself. She continues teaching at Hofstra, Iona, and St. Paul’s University, bringing legal reasoning to students studying law, power, and social behavior. Her dual position, inside and outside traditional institutions, gives her a unique vantage point on what education can and should be.
The foundation she’s building isn’t simply an alternative to universities; it’s a rethinking of what education means in the first place. Rather than organizing knowledge into conventional disciplines, ETF centers on something more fundamental: understanding power dynamics and developing what Ohenewah calls personal authorship. The goal isn’t to credential students for existing career paths but to teach them how to think about agency, intent, and consequence in every area of life.
This vision emerged from Ohenewah’s own experience trying to fit her ideas into systems that weren’t built for them. In Big Law, she saw how legal reasoning could illuminate human behavior far beyond courtrooms and corporate compliance. In academia, she recognized that the most urgent questions about relationships, identity, and power were being addressed inadequately or not at all. The choice became clear: wait for validation from institutions that might never provide it, or claim the authority to build something new.
That choice required confronting a challenge many intellectuals face: the tension between institutional credibility and intellectual autonomy. Ohenewah had worked for years to earn her credentials, yet those very credentials could become constraints if she let them define the boundaries of her work. Her decision to found ETF represented a bet that credibility ultimately comes not from titles but from the quality and relevance of the work itself.
Her approach reflects a core principle she teaches: power and purpose are not granted; they are claimed. She doesn’t position herself as someone seeking permission to build an alternative university. She positions herself as someone who recognized a need, possessed the expertise to address it, and took action. That distinction matters because it models the very kind of agency ETF aims to develop in others.
The foundation’s flagship program, Men’s Rea™, demonstrates this philosophy in action. Rather than creating another men’s empowerment seminar or gender studies course, Ohenewah developed something that exists in neither category: an examination of modern masculinity through criminal, tort, and contract law frameworks. The program addresses male loneliness and dating dysfunction not as social problems requiring policy solutions but as questions of personal power requiring analytical tools.
This interdisciplinary approach, blending legal reasoning with sociological insight and humanistic inquiry, reflects Ohenewah’s broader vision for ETF. She’s not simply teaching people to think like lawyers; she’s teaching them to apply legal precision to the most intimate aspects of their lives. The result is education that’s simultaneously rigorous and deeply personal, intellectual and immediately applicable.
Her long-term vision extends beyond programs and curricula. Ohenewah plans to develop ETF into a global institution, write books, deliver keynote lectures, and create a body of work that redefines what education can be. She’s building not just an organization but a methodology and a legacy.
What makes this vision compelling isn’t its ambition but its clarity. Ohenewah isn’t trying to disrupt education for its own sake or to build a personal brand. She identified a gap between what people need to understand and what existing institutions teach, and systematically set about filling it. Her willingness to operate outside traditional structures gives her the freedom to ask fundamental questions: What is education for? What knowledge actually matters? How do we develop genuine agency rather than simply accumulating credentials?
These aren’t new questions, but Ohenewah’s approach to answering them is. By grounding ETF in legal reasoning and power literacy, she’s offering an educational model that’s neither purely academic nor purely practical, but something more integrative. And by building it herself rather than waiting for institutional approval, she’s demonstrating the very principle she teaches: respond to who you truly are, not to systems that would define you otherwise.