Productive tensions with traditional academic practices develop within a graduate certificate program in community engagement at Tulane University. The program offers an alternative approach to traditional graduate education practices by fostering community, epistemic justice, and care for the whole person through sustained interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. A 2021-22 survey of current and prior program participants in the graduate certificate program documents a variety of tensions that arise when the graduate certificate program is compared to students' main experiences with graduate school at Tulane. The analysis relies on theories and concepts of epistemic injustice, decolonizing methodologies, and community engagement, which enable the interpretation of results. We find that results point to the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship's differences in approaches compared to traditional graduate educational experiences at Tulane, offering insights into more ethical and humane possibilities for graduate education generally, as well as insights into community-engaged graduate education. These insights would be useful to graduate program directors, graduate students, community engagement advocates inside and outside academia, and administrators interested in connecting their universities to local communities through ethically informed, graduate student-led scholarly collaborations.