Academic Jonathan Jansen goes back to his roots - now as a turnaround teacher

With hard years in higher education behind him, his recent memoir well received and another book in the pipeline, Jonathan Jansen, self-confessed public nuisance, says he is living his “best life”.

At Surfers Corner in Muizenberg, in one of his favourite coffee shops, Jansen, 68, talks to the FM about his current work.

It is a couple of days before he leaves for Harvard to take up a Chen Yidan fellowship to teach master’s students on “South Africa 30 Years Later: Changing Schools in Challenging Contexts”.

The prolific author says his memoir, Breaking Bread, “is to say we need to break bread not only in a narrow spiritual sense, but in this broader humane sense, in which breaking bread is simply another way of having communion with people you presume are different [but find that] they’re not”.

Jansen writes in the book’s introduction: “An important goal of this memoir was to give readers a sense of time and place ... Put differently, this is not simply the straightforward story of a grateful life, but one of a resilient community on the Cape Flats.”

Jansen says he was a journeyman in his university career, moving through the ranks of university administration and leadership and concluding as vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State (UFS) from 2009 to 2017. The time at the UFS started with having to deal with racist student behaviour and ended with leading the university during the difficult nationwide Fees Must Fall campaign.

During this time he maintained an active research agenda and obtained a high research rating “on the job”. But this period took its toll.

After leaving the UFS Jansen spent a year as a fellow at Stanford University — where in 1991 he had obtained his PhD — writing, recuperating and “recalibrating” for a new journey.

“I knew I wanted to just do research, just write, just mentor future academic leaders.” When Stellenbosch University offered him exactly that from 2018, he grabbed the opportunity. 

“It was absolutely fantastic not to have to go to a single faculty, board, senate or council meeting. That was what I had done all my life. Now I could decide what I would do from day to day. It normally involved working at a school, teaching young academics and giving an occasional guest lecture, as well as putting together seven research projects.”

Jansen says modestly that “every now and then” he wins an international or local award. The awards, such as from Harvard, come two or three times a year. “That’s how we run the show — it’s been absolutely invigorating, fascinating.”

He expects to publish four books this year. “So that’s the life I live at the moment.”

He pauses.

“And then I did something stupid.”

Early this year, on hearing that Crestway High School in Retreat, close to where he grew up, had a matric pass rate of 35.9% — the worst in the Western Cape — he called the education department and offered to turn it around. He estimates the process will take about two years.

He starts work at Crestway at 6.30 every morning and leaves for Stellenbosch at 1pm.

Asked about the school’s progress, Jansen says: “It’s going too well, too soon.”

He realised that change was necessary academically as well as culturally. Academic results could easily be improved, but changing the school culture would take longer.

Jansen says his experience at the school, which includes teaching, reinforces for him what he knew intellectually: “Every child can learn — regardless of their address, their colour, their gender — and every child can succeed.

“What is different is trying to figure out how to teach a particular group of children like these compared with those in a school that’s flush with money and where parents are rich.”

In his memoir Jansen movingly describes how his life changed one day when he was in grade 10 and a teacher took him aside and said to him: “I have high hopes for you, my boy. You have potential.”

Because of that he not only never came second in class again but was inspired to become a teacher himself. “[Successful] teaching is about, in the first place, connecting with 30 to 40 kids in the class. They must understand that to you as a teacher, they are the most important people in the world. And for me they are. I teach them as if their lives depend on this.”

Crestway has 1,236 pupils. Says Jansen: “Imagine the influence you can have even if just 80% of them respond to you. Imagine if you can take every one of those children out of poverty by enabling them to obtain a good grade 12 pass. Imagine if just 40% of those children, who are from very dangerous areas around here, could go to college or university. Imagine you do that every year.”

The Crestway turnaround experience features in his Harvard lecture. It also provides material for his new book, which he hopes will be distributed to every school in the country once it is published. 

“It’s a hell of a privilege to do this and [make] a contribution to human capital in our country.”