“We’ve had people say, ‘oh, that’s just terrible’, but I believe that was the right thing to do - and I say that as a Christian. We had to move away from the Calvinist vision of before, so we started the process of symbolic reparation. We had to look at the way the university named itself and one of the most important aspects of that was the emblem which, if you look at it carefully, carried very troubling images of the world of Orange, of the Voortrekker movement, only of the battles from the Afrikaner point of view.
“Our argument has always been that those symbols are indeed important to some of our people, but others find them offensive. We have to have inclusive symbols, while understanding that we could not completely undermine that sense of continuity with the past. We are, after all, a university that served a part of our population in a particular way for a long time.
“The senate and council approved the changes, and now I think we have a more embracing set of symbols. For example, we no longer refer to God in the motto. Now we have a reference to truth, which is a transcendent symbol, even for those who don’t believe in anything. That reference is about both spiritual and scientific truth, but this is only in addition to the real, hard work being done on the ground in terms of material reparations.”
A deeply personal advantage for Jansen was his experience at the University of Pretoria, another Afrikaans institution whose culture prepared him to some extent for what he would find at Free State. If he didn’t realise the value of the time he spent at Tuks before, he has felt it fully on over the past 18 months.
He admits with a laugh, “my friends always say I’m bit of a Pollyanna. But I’ve never before enjoyed my work so much. So in a way it’s a real pity that those four Reitz students allowed many people to make a judgment about a whole place like this. That does not mean there weren’t serious problems at the institutional level - because there were. We just didn’t appreciate the over-emphasis.”
Jansen worships his leadership team. Trust between them is everything. “We had to be firm and decisive about stuff that was wrong. We had to be able to go to the council and say, look, we’ve got to face up to the fact that the curriculum does not reflect a democratic and academically advanced view of the world and this is what we can do if we put our heads together. We felt we all had to get behind a vision and revise our thinking, so we asked the senate, well, is this something you can live with - and they could.”
His opinion now is that it is much easier to transform an historically Afrikaans university than an English one.
“There can be the illusion of innocence at some of those institutions, maybe even some sense of self-satisfaction, and maybe a view that if anybody has to change, it’s the people on the other side. So for me it’s such a fantastic thing to be at the University of the Free State. Not once have I had to convince a colleague that something was the right thing by moving heaven and Earth. Everybody just does it. We’re all very much into joy and optimism here.
“If one thing made me spiritual again, it’s been this. And I believe what has happened here would not have been possible on only human intervention.”
There are some big fights behind Jansen now, such as raising the academic standard for admission.
“That meant we had 23 percent more applications this year than last year, and this is what happens when people sense you are not selling a cheap product. That meant creating an academic core curriculum for all undergraduates that had a broader intellectual basis for being a scholar.
“We cheer every time parents want to know the value of a qualification from our university. We are comfortable to say we know it will now stand their children in good stead. We don’t want students who’ve just scraped through matric, so we wrote to every parent of a prospective student and said, we need your support.
“The average parent knows when they are being sold short and we’re definitely not doing that.”
Jansen is very taken by the decision for him to teach again this year as one of the academics giving a compulsory course on 10 big life questions. That’s part of the plot to allow undergraduates to think much more broadly.
He’s also immersing himself in fresh academic conversations which are changing and improving with the appointments of new professors.
“When I finished my PhD at Stanford, I had absolutely nobody to mentor me, to tell me not to waste my time by writing for the wrong journals and so on. South Africa’s got a major problem with its professoriate, with especially white men leaving the system.
“What we need to do now is take every really promising young academic, who has more than the basic smarts, and mentor them.
“We want our colleagues out there in the world to sense that something exciting is happening here and that they should want to be part of it. So we’ve had to re-examine the intellectual architecture we had – issues that are evident in all Afrikaans heritage institutions.
“For example, physical science has always been extremely strong at those universities, so we knew we didn’t have to fiddle too much there, but humanities and education were not as well-disciplined, being more susceptible to the apartheid project, so we needed to get in new professors. We’ve been very lucky with the radical thinkers we’ve found.”
Yet his Facebook chat with the student in California distinguishes the friendships Jansen cherishes most. His own picture on the social networking site is hilariously down to earth.
“If you took students away, it would kill my spirit. I have one sleeping in my house. On Friday, a whole bunch is coming for a braai. When we open, I’ll be part of the guard of honour. I’m in and out of their homes. I’ll be dishing ice-cream with my colleagues at Rag. My own daughter, who is 19, is here as a student and she doesn’t want to leave Bloemfontein even in the holidays. People are always knocking on the door of our home, making my wife and I dinner and bringing us flowers. They’re concerned about making sure we’re doing well. So we’re really trying our best to make that happen.” - Pretoria News
