​Not many A1 rated academics can among their outputs and citations list that their tweets in support of Springbok rugby were quoted in newspapers.  But such is the nature and public following of Prof Jonathan Jansen, distinguished professor in education at Stellenbosch University (SU) and president of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Earlier this year the 65-year-old thought leader on South African education and the country at large received his second A rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF). The first he received while still rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State (UFS), a position he held from 2009 to 2016. He joined SU in 2017.

Among this former science teacher's many accolades are honorary degrees from universities in Scotland, the USA and South Africa, the Education Africa Lifetime Award and Stanford University's inaugural Alumni Excellence Award. He is an Elected Fellow of the International Academy of Education, and in 2021 received the Human Sciences Research Council and Universities South Africa's Gold Medal.

Jansen however prides himself more on the popular and academic books and articles he has produced, on the young academics he has mentored, on connecting with his Twitter and Facebook followers, and for the past decade engaging readers through his weekly opinion piece in the The Times and other South African newspapers.

This motivating speaker who cuts through fluff reckons that he has visited more local schools than most politicians. In recent months he for instance addressed actuarial graduates and a church group in Cape Town, and spoke at the 200^th year celebrations of Muir College, the Eastern Cape and South Africa's oldest boys' school.

His recent message to attendees of the International Chemistry Education Conference was quite clear: “Teach with attitude, teach for meaning, and teach for change."

Academic activist

This activist for academic excellence and for a better South Africa takes his “civic duty" as an academic seriously.

He's however had to develop some of the thickest skin in South African academia, as he doesn't shy away from critique or stating in the media how he sees things.

If media headlines are anything to go by, he is a “you either like him or hate him" kind of guy. Jansen, however, says he is a comprehender rather than a stirrer, and is driven by the need to understand complex aspects of science and society.

But, to use one of his own favourite phrases: “Here's the thing …"

Despite being one of the most visible and vocal academics in South Africa, Jansen doesn't want people to remember him. At all.

“I want them to remember the people in whose lives I've made a different. In the bigger scheme of things I am irrelevant to this world.

“My late mother always switched to her childhood language of Afrikaans when she wanted to leave you with some beautiful wisdom. She'd for instance say: 'Dis alles net die genade'," reflects the professor who revels in his love of languages.

Shaping futures

Asked to describe himself, he does so in fewer characters than what a tweet allows: “I am absolutely passionate about teaching and passionate about just making the world I live in better for others. That's it."

This he has been doing since finishing his BSc studies at the University of the Western Cape and his first teaching post in Vredenburg in the 1970s, and subsequent positions such as dean of education at the University of Durban-Westville (now a campus at the University of Kwazulu-Natal) and the University of Pretoria.

To support, prod and challenge others into growing is fundamental to his DNA. As with his own two children, he enjoys seeing younger academics grow, and helping them realise their own personal and intellectual worth.

To this end leading and teaching the first two cohorts of South Africa's Future Professors Programme, based at SU, provides great joy. It's built on a concept that Jansen instigated as rector of UFS. It strengthens and prepares senior lecturer-equivalent scholars to take up their positions among the professorate. 

“All we do is take very smart people towards the upper reaches of the academic ladder. And I get the thrill, the joy, of seeing senior lecturers in 26 public universities become associate professors, professors. Do you know what a feeling, what a rush that brings to one's life?"

Jansen, who recently welcomed his second grandchild, says one way that parents can know that they've raised their children well is “if they become better than you".

“Then you know that you have done your job."

Intellectual puzzles

Others have spoken into his own life too, such as psychologist Prof Chabani Manganyi, a valued mentor during his time at the University of Pretoria.

“One day he said: 'You know JJ, your problem is you get angry before you think'. Since that day I will turn even the most grievous, upsetting problem into an intellectual puzzle."

One such example was his award-winning book, Knowledge in the blood, about how young white Afrikaans-speaking youth come to embrace a past they were never part of. He wrote it while serving as UFS rector.

“The day I stop writing is the day I stop breathing. The day I stop thinking is the day I stop existing," says this avid sports lover for whom writing for five to six hours a day as the best form of relaxation.

“Coming up with new problems to solve through thinking and writing doesn't feel like working."

“I hate Fridays and I love Mondays. I have long given up working. I absolutely enjoy it, and will do this to the day I die. Because I love the life of the mind. 

The cerebral luxury of having enough time to think is something he guards doggedly since joining SU.  It's a luxury he has earned through carrying the burdens of university management during tumultuous years in South Africa, and as member of a long list of boards, committees, advisory panels and editorial teams.

Books

Jansen tries writing at least one academic and one popular book per year, often in conjunction with colleagues or former students. This year (2022) has already seen four produced. 

“My scholarship must speak to my intellectual community but also to my lived community," he explains. “Therefore, several of my books are aimed at the broader communities in which I live and work. It's how I translate my research works into practical and accessible 'science communication' as part of my public service commitments."

Song for Sarah (2018, written with his sister) shone a light on the dignified lives of working-class Cape Flats women. How to fix South Africa's Schools (2014) and A school where I belong (2018) provided education leaders with strategies on transformation, while Learning lessons (2020) advised young people how to make their education work for them.

The decolonization of knowledge (2022) examined the uptake of curriculum within ten public universities, while Who gets in and why? (2019) was the first empirical study to link the micro-politics of school desegregation to the macro-politics of social transition. Fault Lines: A primer on race, science and society (2020) explored the lingering consequence of race and racism.

Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (2014) won the British Academy for the Social Sciences and Humanities's Nayef Al Rodhan Prize, while As by Fire: the end of the South African University (2017) won a SA Literary Award.

Jansen still rates the former as his “most impactful" book.

“It did something that nobody expected. Instead of just talking about how white Afrikaans youth acquire knowledge about our past, it was a profoundly intimate story about how they transformed me, the first Black Dean of Education at Tukkies.

“I don't think people could have guessed that it would be so personal," says Jansen, who grew up on the Cape Flats.

“No one had yet written so intimately, close-up about the intergenerational mechanisms involved in the transfer of knowledge in post-traumatic societies, not at that level of detail. That's even true for the thousands of books written on the Holocaust."

The politics of knowledge

His interests in curriculum change, institutional analysis , political science and the politics of knowledge took shape in the 1980s when he was a young high school biology teacher looking for alternatives to the apartheid curriculum. These ideas were honed through subsequent postgraduate studies and mentors such as Prof George Posner at Cornell University and Prof Hans Weiler at Stanford University.

Jansen says it is important to understand that research, science and official knowledge (curriculum) built up around it are never really neutral, value-free or without baggage. Power, politics and authority come into play. It is time frame and context dependent.

“I try to show for all the sciences, for the social, natural or humanities, that all knowledge is a product of politics.

“When deciding what to teach, for instance, you always have to select, because there are so much knowledge to choose from. But the moment you select you have to include some things, and exclude others. And that is the politics of knowledge pure and simple.

​His PhD, from Stanford University in 1991, was on the state and curriculum in Zimbabwe.

That same year he published his first major work on the politics of knowledge, Knowledge and Power: Critical Perspectives Across the Disciplines. It critically analysed knowledge/power in fields from nursing to anthropology, and from urban planning to dentistry.

These days he is again researching the lingering ideologies or so-called “imperial durabilities" in the medical sciences, and writing a book on human anatomy and genetics in South Africa with former postdoctoral fellow Dr Jess Auerbach and current post-doc Dr Cyrill Walters.

“You cannot understand the power of medicine without looking at history. It allows you to understand the lingering effects of troubled knowledge."​​