Event Details
Topic: Leading for Change: Is there still a place for forgiveness in leadership practice in SA today.
Professor Jonathan Jansen is a former Vice-Chancellor of several universities, currently Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University, President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and President of the SA Institute of Race Relations. His research is concerned with the politics of knowledge in schools and universities. He has authored many books, including Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Pastdeclared one of the best books of that year by the American Libraries Association, The decolonisation of knowledge, Corrupted: a study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities, Making Love in a War Zone concerning interracial intimacies among university students and Leading for Change: Race, Intimacy and Leadership on Divided University Campuses which describes the transformation of race relations among students at the UFS over a six-year period.
He started his career as a biology teacher in the Cape after receiving a science degree from the University of the Western Cape. He obtained a MS degree from Cornell University and a PhD from Stanford. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vermont and Cleveland State University.
He was awarded the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award in New York, the Spend Love Award from the University of California for his contributions to tolerance, democracy and human rights, and he has also won the largest book award from the British Academy for Social Sciences and Humanities for his book, "Knowledge in the Blood".
Jansen was the first black president of the historically white University of the Free State. It was a step up from his previous post as dean of education at another former white institution, the University of Pretoria, where he had played a leading role in integrating the campus. And it posed an even greater challenge. Jansen arrived at UFS to find that reconciliation between white Afrikaner and black students was in turmoil even though Nelson Mandela had earlier declared the school a model of post-racial transformation. There had been incidents of violence centering on race, religion and culture. In a few years', students self-segregated themselves on campus — especially in the dorms. An ugly incident involving white students hazing black workers who clean the residences had shown up in an online video. It was against that background that Jansen was portrayed in South African media as "a healer," To much skepticism, Jansen announced plans to forgo revenge and instead forgive past transgressions. He vowed to foster black-white empathy "by refashioning the university's culture into a bridge" where whites and blacks meet perfectly in the middle. He made the case that every white student should learn to speak Sesotho, the local Basotho language, and every black student should learn Afrikaans. He ordered that every dormitory would be 50/50 black/white to break the segregation practices that had developed in them.
Jansen was one of five children of a domestic worker, later a driver, and a nurse who reared him in "a bubble of decency" amid constant harassment of blacks — often by unwarranted police brutality. He witnessed humiliation, murder, rape and suicide. The family's property, owned for generations, was appropriated by the state as part of a strategy to disempower blacks. He was intensely religious, but he does not deny that he was an angry young man.
And yet, Jansen finished high school fuelled by the encouragement of an 8th grade teacher. He went on to dodge bullets, fists, racism and harassment at university during the time of the 1976 Soweto uprising which spread throughout the country including the University of the Western Cape where he was a student pursuing a bachelor of science degree. As a teacher he was enmeshed in the lives of his students, even visiting them in the hospital when they were victimised during violence prior to the dismantling of apartheid.
Jansen came to the attention of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and American activists, who selected him for a scholarship at Cornell University. He then went to Stanford to pursue his doctorate. His dissertation analysed curriculum reform in Zimbabwe, "distinguishing what factors inhibit radical change, from an inherited curriculum to something more progressive." While at the GSE, he also examined education systems in Nicaragua, Cuba and Tanzania.
