Black Dean: Race, Reconciliation, and the Emotions of Deanship

In this article, Jonathan Jansen describes his experiences as a Black dean in the formerly all-White University of Pretoria in South Africa. The article shows how race, gender, history, and institutional culture constitute emotional terrain in which decanal leadership plays itself out in the volatile postapartheid era. In the context of South Africa's negotiated transition to majority rule, Black leadership in this still dominant White institution means balancing tensions of affirmation and inclusion, retention and restitution, caring and correction, accommodation and assertion, and racial reconciliation and social justice. In telling his story, Jansen takes on, among other concerns, the ethnocentric character of Western research on leadership, the paucity of critical literature on the deanship, and the general lack of studies on educational leadership in postconflict societies.