Leading for Change

Race, intimacy and leadership on divided university campuses

Jonathan Jansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780815357636
• eBook ISBN: 9781317495161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers new theoretical ground for thinking about, and transforming, leadership and higher education worldwide. Through an examination of the construct of intimacy and 'nearness', including emotional, spiritual, psychic, intellectual, and physical closeness, Jonathan Jansen demonstrates its power to influence positive leadership in young people. He argues that sensory leadership, which includes but extends beyond the power of touch, represents a fresh and effective approach to progressive transformation of long divided institutions.

Considering richly textured narratives, chapters explore complex intimacies among Black and White university students in South Africa, post-apartheid and in the aftermath of a major racial atrocity. The stories reveal the students' transformation in the process of 'leadership for change', interweaving concepts of racism, human relationships and intimacy, and in turn expanding the knowledge base of social and institutional improvement. This book explores how, when different kinds of nearness come together in leadership change, young people respond in ways that would not be possible through conventional instruments such as policy, legislation and the appeal to moral sensibilities alone.

Leading for Change will be critical reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, educational justice, higher education, educational leadership and change, social and/or racial justice. This book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of anthropology, social psychology, and South African contemporary politics, policy and institutional practices.

1
A researcher’s guide to intimate storytelling

Introduction

I had always wanted to write an academic book that was a work of scholarship and yet easily readable by non-specialists in the field. The theory binding the book should be immediately evident to the trained academic eye and yet not be an obstacle to fluency of communication. An accomplished historian friend compares this ambition to installing the scaffolding for building a new house and then, when done, to remove these external support structures leaving only the beautiful home in view.

This quest to be accessible through writing might be a function of reaching a season of academic seniority, and therefore little to prove as a scholar, or maybe it is the abiding instincts of a professional teacher that values simplicity. Or perhaps it derives from my earliest reprimand trying to write at high school; to this day I remember the cutting remarks of my Grade 12 English teacher, an old Greek educator called Cockinis: “just say what you want to say and stop using big words.” That comment hurt at the time but it is the best feedback I ever received on an essay or “composition” as it was called in South African schools in those days.

I therefore do not appreciate bombastic language parading as academic writing; frankly, it irritates me. This kind of impenetrable writing precedes but certainly became worse with the postmodern or poststructuralist moment in the social sciences, humanities and even education. Despite solid training in “post” – ways of thinking and doing academic work – I could not grasp why such convoluted language needed to be used. The question I would keep asking of the journal articles and books written in this vein was simply: “What are you trying to say?” There is no question that writing in obscure and complex ways comes from the socialisation of young academics in their disciplines. Through university seminars and academic conferences, you learn acceptable and completely non-natural ways of talking once you enter those communities. You certainly do not talk that way at home.

In South African academic tradition these non-natural ways of talking are reinforced by training researchers to write in the third person. This obviously makes “natural talk” difficult if not impossible; “the researcher believes” is not only odd and unnecessary, it feeds into the kind of distant writing that separates the writer from their own emotions, history and participation in the research process from design to conduct to outcomes. Fortunately, social research in the qualitative tradition has come a long way since the narrow, positivist thinking that tries to apply an outdated notion of scientific objectivity to human studies. The research for this monograph works inside such advances in qualitative research¹ by drawing on intimate encounters between white and black students over a period of five years at the University of the Free State in middle South Africa.

In the book Coming Close, Jane Mead makes the pertinent observation that: “One of the great privileges of teaching, of having students, is the way it puts you in people’s lives just as they are open to learning, and perhaps even open to how that learning might change them.”² From this vantage point, many of the stories I tell rely largely on my direct experiences with, observations of, and discussions among students in which I was present, observing how they learn and change. What follows, therefore, is not simply research on intimacy but intimacy in research in which “the rhythm, smell, sense, tension and pleasure that go into producing data” should be evident in the stories told.³

Some of these intimate encounters were recorded instantly and appear – without theoretical commentary – in my Times columns on Thursdays and in the popular collections of these same pieces in the books We Need to Talk and We Need to Act.⁴

There is a sensible criticism of “mere stories” in some of the literature and this is why the narration of student lives and experiences in this book is hooked onto theories of closeness, intimacy and nearness, primarily in the field of social psychology but also history, curriculum theory and politics. A story in itself can be passed off as anecdote unless, as attempted in this book, it is placed in social and intellectual contexts that assign those stories structure, meaning and significance.⁵ For those who cannot resist placing the book somewhere within the changing taxonomies of qualitative methods, this particular approach to storied writing comes closest to what Norman Denzin calls interpretive auto-ethnography.⁶

One of the core concepts from new ways of doing auto-ethnography, and that shows up in the stories that frame this book, is that it “shifts the focus from authority to vulnerability”.⁷ The people in the stories, the writer and the students, are therefore presented as imperfect human beings struggling to create intimate community on difficult terrain. To be vulnerable, in this context, means “to be fragile, to be susceptible to wounding (Latin, vulnus or wound) and to suffering”⁸ as will become evident in the narration. It is this state of fragility and the risk it carries that makes intimacy possible, for “vulnerability and dependency are intertwined”.⁹

There is a rich tradition of writing stories in this way when it comes to particular kinds of scholarly writing, as in American scholar Beverley Daniel Tatum’s celebrated monograph Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?¹⁰ And, more recently, the edited South African book, Being at ‘Home’: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions.¹¹

But this is not simply a narrative analysis of student stories; it is also an attempt to tell the story of institutions, principally this century-old university with its rich store of memories, history and tradition. The analytical task, as will be seen, was to connect stories of individuals and groups to the stories of the institution. Student experiences, and how they come to voice them, hang together with the overhead institutional story either as reinforcement of, or resistance to, what the young people already know. At the heart of the institutional story is of course the curriculum as an institution¹² and how unsettling that codification of knowledge challenges and conflicts with received stories held by black and white students alike.

Even the university as an institutional story is embedded within other social institutions such as schools, homes and churches. I deliberately did not dwell too much on these other interlocking institutions since that was done in my predecessor book, Knowledge in the Blood.¹³ Suffice to say in this work that students come into university not only with intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge from powerful institutions; again, those incoming stories are told more fleetingly here because they appear elsewhere.

Stories are always contested and conflictual, and in saying that I locate my work broadly within the critical theory tradition without being overly constrained or orthodox about one theoretical disposition. The stories told in this book are about power, but not one-dimensional power. I avoid therefore the simple narratives of evil white/good black or powerful oppressor and powerless victims, the easy binaries of both popular literature, as well as academic writing on two of race’s most troubled institutions, slavery and domestic labour.

The stories shared are on the lookout for exceptions, for intimacies that do not make sense and that are avoided, dismissed or sneered at in mainstream social science research. I examine, in other words, opportunities opened up by complex intimacies that offer glimmers of hope and healing rather than the pessimism of the regnant literatures on the subject.

I take advantage of my training as a comparativist to draw out comparison between stories about individuals and institutions in South Africa and the United States of America. More than a few scholars have been attracted to the utility of comparison between these two countries with their parallel histories of chattel slavery, white supremacy and racial segregation, and the common and divergent ways in which these phenomena were expressed on either side of the Atlantic.¹⁴ Both novels about the past and real stories from the present in the two countries demonstrate the enduring effects of race and racism which, in turn, raise questions about claims that we have actually achieved post-racial (in the USA) or post-apartheid (South Africa) community.

How then were the stories compiled? Next to my office desk is a large brown box. Every time I received an angry or gracious letter on transformation, I would slip it into that box. Now and again the letter would be so inflammatory, even deadly, I would call in my secretary and read it to her; she would shake her head in disgust and I would tear up the derogatory piece. Surely even social research must have its limits on what counts as data when it comes to such demeaning and degrading sources? So instead of landing up in the big brown box on my right for later analysis, it would end up in the dirt bin on my left as garbage. As indicated, many of the stories were immediately written up as columns for The Times, though without the kind of academic commentary allowed for in this book.

Throughout the telling of the stories in the book I have guarded against unfounded optimism. I wanted of course to tell stories of progress but also of recidivism; of students experiencing transformation and those who, sadly, do not; of dangerous intimacies alongside loving affection which “sees the other in oneself”, or nearness as I coined it. More than anything I wanted to convey the messiness of change and that transformation in large and complex organisations is never a straight line going forward.

How does one bring these stories to light in a vivid and memorable way that writing in words, alone, cannot? This is particularly important for those reading about a place they will never visit and human faces they will never encounter. We accumulated more than one thousand photographs of students, and of students in interaction with leadership, and each other, to convey the dynamism of campus life and the intimacies of human connection over the five-year period. The selection of photographs for the book was carefully chosen to capture the arrhythmia of transformation impulses in the heart of a fast-changing, conservative university. In these portraits I wanted to, moreover, capture stories of trauma and triumph, hurt and healing, hopelessness and hope.

Photographs are not innocent, though, as Monica Moreno Figueroa tells in the text Looking Emotionally: Photography, racism and intimacy in research.¹⁵ A photograph has no context to a neutral observer; it is interpreted. It might mean different things to “sitters” and takers of the image. It is manufactured by photographer and subject alike, a point Karina Simonson demonstrates in How to Photograph Nelson Mandela.¹⁶ As Figueroa puts it:

Photographs, discourses of race and beauty, and experiences of racism can be easily entangled with the pleasure of looking, forgetting their histories of formation and the material and symbolic meanings they have accumulated.¹⁷

The evidence for ocular misrepresentation is particularly disturbing in historical images of race and race relations, such as in period photographs of melon-eating blacks “under which condition no darkey boy could help looking happy”.¹⁸ And yet photographs – not only of suffering – offer “an intimacy unrivalled by other images” with the power to convey emotion, spur action and distil hope.¹⁹

Conscious of the threat of misrepresentation, and yet alert to the hopefulness of selected images, I placed each of the photographs in the narrative run of the book offering context and explanation, including a sense of time and place, so that the reader is provided some measure of interpretation for what is being observed even as I recognise that such meaning-making ultimately resides with those who will “read” these pictures.

It should now be clear that I deliberately chose for the introductory pages of this book the playful ambiguities presented in the unlikely photograph of two young girls, believed to have been taken inside one of the Boer War concentration camps more than one hundred years ago.

What is going on here? How is it possible that a black hand, on top, holds a white hand at a time when racial subjugation was already firmly fixed through colonial conquest? How “real” is the image, therefore, as a reflection of race relations at the time or is this photograph staged – notice the matching of the colours of the umbrellas with the skin tones of the girls.²⁰ And what are those puzzlin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Poem: “Somehow we survive”
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 A researcher’s guide to intimate storytelling
• 2 Dangerous intimacies: explaining the Reitz scandal
• 3 “The misnamed free state”
• 4 Intimacy
• 5 The resident swastika
• 6 Intimacy demands a common language
• 7 The labour of intimacy
• 8 Intimate knowledges
• 9 Portraits of intimacy
• 10 From intimacy to nearness
• 11 A near and present danger
• 12 The intimate observer
• 13 Nearness in leadership
• Index