[lg policy] South Africa: South African Institute of Race Relations statement on Professor Jansen

Fri Oct 23 14:57:18 UTC 2009

South African Institute of Race Relations statement on Professor Jansen

 Last Friday Professor Jonathan Jansen was inaugurated as the rector
and vice chancellor of the University of the Free State. Professor
Jansen was also recently appointed as the president of the South
African Institute of Race Relations. At his inauguration Professor
Jansen made a speech about the future of the University of the Free
State. The university is an extraordinary case in that it is a public
institution that has come to represent ideals at odds with the
equality, human dignity, and equal opportunity central to South Africa
becoming an equal and prosperous society. It requires dramatic
intervention in order to align it with those ideals. Professor Jansen
has provided the university with a roadmap to meet those ideals. The
path that he has charted for the University of the Free State also
contains many the elements necessary for the success of our country.
These range from the importance of leadership to the vexed issue of
transformation. Inherent in the professor’s address was the message
that human endeavour and hard work was necessary to overcome
adversity.

Professor Jansen has been widely attacked for his decision to drop the
university’s internal complaint against the Reitz four. At the time of
the Reitz incident the Institute issued a statement decrying the
incident and calling for criminal charges against those students
involved. Those charges are proceeding as they should. The Institute
has previously said that by sentencing the four young men to cleaning
public toilets they might learn something about the dignity of labour.
That remains the position of the Institute.

It is now time for the professor’s critics to stand down. Students at
the university should think long and hard about whether a continuation
of their protest is in their own best interests. They should have the
sense to acknowledge that while they may disagree with their rector on
this one point almost every other major point he made of Friday night
promises them an institution that may lead the transformation of
higher education in South Africa.

To his great credit Professor Jansen has stood his ground and refused
to be intimidated or bullied particularly where he was taken to task
by politicians. Further to his credit is that he must have foreseen
the controversy that he was courting but had the courage of leadership
to proceed regardless on the grounds that he believed his action to be
in the best long-term interests of the university.

The issue of leadership both led his address and featured prominently
throughout it. Not only did he draw attention to the need for strong
leadership to guide the university out of its recent turbulent past
but suggested that a general lack of leadership was to blame for many
of the university’s problems in the first place.

In an extraordinary example of leadership, Professor Jansen then took
it upon himself to apologise to every person that had ever been a
victim of discrimination by his university. He also apologised to
South Africa for the role that the university had played during
apartheid. In the early 1990s apologies for apartheid were a dime a
dozen. Every one time apartheid supporter and his dog were apologising
for apartheid with what often appeared to limited sincerity. But this
was different, as here was a black man assuming the responsibility for
what the white guard had done before him, and apologising to the
country for that. There was no malice in his apology and no suggestion
that his responsibility in leading the university was in any way
mitigated by what had came before him.

It has often been too easy for the leadership of the country’s post
1994 institutions and its government to blame their failures on what
had gone before them. While Professor Jansen went further than could
reasonably be expected of him, he has set an important precedent in
taking responsibility for the future of the institution under his
management.

On language policy for the university Professor Jansen said that he
was not in the business of cutting languages from the university but
of adding more. He suggested that under his leadership new students
would be required to take a language other than their home language.
For white South Africans this means learning to speak something other
than English and Afrikaans. This step promises to pay substantial
dividends for future race relations. South Africa’s private and
predominantly white schools and its universities should take note.

So should the broader society. It has too often been the case that
South Africa has discarded skills, institutions, and traditions simply
because they originated in the past. This has been to the great loss
of the country as whole. Professor Jansen is showing that it is
possible both to transform a public institution while at the same time
retaining those elements of its past that remain valuable and
productive.

On elitism Professor Jansen made it clear that universities were
elitist organisations. He would not apologise for that or pretend that
the University of the Free State was any different. But the nature of
the elitism would have more to do with the academic prestige of the
organisation than with the race and social standing of its students.
In this regard he asked the council of the university to review his
salary and cut it and direct the savings at bursaries for both poor
black and poor white students.

This message was a welcome break from the political mollycoddling that
goes on in far too many South African organisations and institutions.
Too many universities have meekly accepted directives from politicians
to take on students that should never have made it to university.
Professor Jansen effectively drew a line in the sand to say that he
would not succumb to political or populist pressures for his
university to pretend to be something it could not be.

On education Professor Jansen said that the university could not
accept the responsibility for educating students who were too poorly
prepared to cope with university study. But he added nor could the
university sit back and wait for the quality of the public school
system to deliver university candidates that would probably not be
forthcoming. He would therefore see to it that the university took an
active interest in the schools in the community that it served to aid
them in improving their standards.

On transformation Professor Jansen said that he would seek to attract
25 new senior academic staff to the university. He said that this
would be done in a manner that did not see quality played off against
affirmative action. He said that such a step was necessary not solely
to transform the racial make up of the university staff, but to ensure
that the university drew on the broadest possible skills pool. The
university would not make it into the top 150 in the world, said
Professor Jansen, by relying on the skills pool of a racial minority.
The Institute has long stood against simple racial representivity in
any area of South African life. However the university, its
institutional culture, and recent history are an extraordinary case.
If Professor Jansen can employ those 25 academics in the spirit that
he intends he may be able to use these appointments to demonstrate
that is possible to effect affirmative action in South Africa without
denying opportunities to whites, without a drop in standards, and free
from the corrupt crony capitalism that has come to characterise
affirmative action as practised in Government and parts of the private
sector.

On alcohol Professor Jansen promised to put an end to the drinking of
alcohol in campus residences. He wanted instead to instill a culture
of learning on his campus. Professor Jansen said that he was not in
the business of producing alcoholics. On this commitment the professor
will have his work cut out. There is no doubt that he knows this and
is wholly aware that he may make some enemies. But he also believes
that it is right and correct and necessary for his vision to succeed.

On initiation Professor Jansen said that he would personally lay the
criminal charges against any student that lay a hand on any first-year
student in 2010. He said that he would put an end to the archaic and
militaristic practices that had no place at a modern university. The
professor pointed out that these practices enforced the culture that
had led to the Reitz scandal in the first place.

On integration Professor Jansen said that this would be implemented
from 2010. The Reitz residence would be reopened and lead the way in
becoming the model of racial reconciliation and integration on the
campus.

The assembled vice chancellors and rectors of South Africa’s other
universities must have realised that they were witnessing a speech by
a man who wanted to fundamentally alter the nature of university
education in South Africa. Many of them must have gone back to their
campuses and councils realising that if they did not act with similar
insight and speed they may be left behind in terms of the true
transformation of South African higher education.

South Africa should take note of the obvious value that the professor
placed on his family and the support that they had offered him. He
publicly expressed his affection for his wife and his two children. He
spoke of how proud his parents would have been if they had lived long
enough to see what their son, raised on the Cape Flats, had made of
his life. He said his mother would have cried while his father would
have told him he had done well but that there was room for
improvement. The way he spoke you would not have thought that he was
speaking with 500 relative strangers looking on. Inherent in those
comments was the message that only through hard work and human
endeavor could one conquer adversity and that basic principles of
integrity and loyalty are crucial to personal success. If the
professor manages to inculcate that personal philosophy in his
students and his staff there is every reason to believe that his
university may become the leading one in the country and one of the
top 150 in the world.

Frans Cronje
Deputy CEO
South African Institute of Race Relations
9th Floor
Renaissance Centre
16-20 New St South
Gandhi Square
Johannesburg
Tel: + 27 11 492 0600
www.sairr.org.za

http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/common-dialogue/2009/10/22/south-african-institute-of-race-relations-statement-on-professor-jansen-and-teh-u/#
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