Biosketch

Prof Jonathan Jansen

Professor Jansen obtained his BSc in Botany and Zoology from the University of the Western Cape and Honours in Education from UNISA, before moving to the USA to complete an MSc in Curriculum at Cornell and a PhD in Education at Stanford University. He served as the Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria for nine years before taking up the position of Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State, being the first black academic in the university’s history to do so. He holds numerous fellowships; is Senior Professor at the University of the Free State; and is also President of the SA Institute of Race Relations and of the SA Academy of Science. In 2013, he was awarded the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award in New York and the Spendlove Award from the University of California for his contributions to tolerance, democracy and human rights.

Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. In 2016/17 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and in 2018/9 will be a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is currently President of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

He holds honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vermont and Cleveland State University.

In 2013, he was awarded the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award in New York, the Spendlove Award from the University of California for his contributions to tolerance, democracy and human rights, and he also won the largest book award from the British Academy for the Social Sciences and Humanities for his book, Knowledge in the Blood (published by Stanford University Press).

His recent books include Leading for Change (Routledge, 2016), As by fire: the end of the South African university (Tafelberg, 2017), Interracial intimacies on campuses (Bookstorm, 2017) and Song for Sarah (Bookstorm, 2017). His 2018 books include Inequality in South African schools (with Nic Spaull, publisher Springer), the Politics of Curriculum (Wits University Press) and Who gets in and why? The politics of admissions (UCT Press).