I don't know Jonathan Jansen, the rector and vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State. But I have read some newspaper pieces on him; heard him interviewed on the radio - if Jennifer Crwys-Williams of 702 had fawned any harder, she would doubtless have plotzed; and read some of his columns - they used to appear (maybe still do) in the daily Times.

Jansen always seemed to be too much of a goody-goody for my taste. I like a bit of lemon and salt with my saccharine. Or - shifting metaphors in mid-stream - Jansen seemed to me to be too filled with the milk of human kindness.

We pause here for a moment because, unlike Julius "little Julie" Malema of the youth brigades, we readers of Politicsweb are able to hold more than one thought in our minds at a time, are we not? And we recall that the person who complained about "the milk of human kindness" was that (fictional) person Lady Macbeth - who makes the (non-fictional) Winnie Madikizela-Mandela seem like a girl scout.

"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be/ What thou art promis'd. Yet do I fear thy nature, / It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness/ To catch the nearest way," Lady Macbeth (not Winnie) said to her husband - "nearest" meaning the "most expedient" or "easy". In other words, "you're too much of a kind, good oke to do the easy thing".

We think of Madame Macbeth and Madame Madikizela-Mandela by way of remembering that, notwithstanding my cynicism and jadedness, maybe it is not such a bad thing to be filled with the milk of human kindness.

Second, there was (is) always with Jansen a hint, oh more than a hint, of the religion related to the carpenter's son who perished on the cross. But, pace Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller and Politicsweb readers, I have to say that religion, all religion, puts my teeth on edge. There have been too many pogroms, too many soul-cripplings, nearly all in the name of one religion or another.

Righteous religiosity is especially annoying - and here we pause for a second time - when it is underpinned by slipshod scholarship. In his now famous inaugural lecture as the 13th rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, on 16 October (see here), Jansen said: "Soon after my appointment, I received an e-mail from my friend Chris Abels. It contained a verse of Christian scripture, from the book of Esther 4:14."

"Christian scripture", Jonathan? It was written, or compiled, long before the Nazarene was born and is one of the books of the Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). Get yourself a Wikipedia, dude.  

We pause a second time because that kind of incorrect attribution - "Christian scripture" - bespeaks a sort of unpleasant hegemony. It suggests that "we Christians own it all anyway" - which is the kind of thing so-called Christians have been claiming (and proving) since the Crusades. (Check out Iraq.) This incorrect attribution also suggests a kind of insensitivity, albeit small. Jansen simply doesn't know - or has not thought through properly - or doesn't care - that the lines from the book of Esther are far from being "Christian scripture."

Look again at what he said: "I know I am not alone. Soon after my appointment, I received an e-mail from my friend Chris Abels. It contained a verse of Christian scripture, from the book of Esther 4:14. I ignored it, at first, but since then those words have become very meaningful to me. ‘Is it possible that you have come into the kingdom for such a time as this?'"

Isn't it a bit grandiloquent - isn't it, to ask the question another way, being a bit of a windgat - to think of oneself as Esther? Incidentally, if Jansen had said that he wanted to see the world, and especially Seffrica, through the eyes not of Queen Esther but of Caster Semenya - then we would be cookin'. But that is the subject for a play yet to be written by some young Bertolt Brecht from Bloemfontein.

But having said all that - and remember that we are Politicsweb readers, not one-dimensional bozos from this political party or that or this vershtunkende teachers' union or that - having said all that, let me say that I cried a little when read Jansen's inaugural speech. Journalists and diabetics, as well as cowboys and judges, also cry.

Why? Because Jansen pressed all my buttons. I'm a sucker for people who love their families, who haven't forgotten Bram Fischer, who remember their parents, who do things with passion - and who, above all, want to do the right thing and are not frightened of doing the right thing. Re-read Jansen's speech. It's a moving speech.

But I am also old enough and ugly enough to know when I am being manipulated and that my buttons have been well and skillfully pushed. So when the fuss broke out about Jansen having withdrawn the university's four charges against the Reitz Four, I really wasn't sure that he had done a just or fair thing; and whether I ought to join in his defence.

Am I, as Walt Whitman asked, contradicting myself? Sure I am, "I am large, I contain multitudes". Moreover, as a Politicsweb writer and reader, I can have conflicting and swirling emotions that I can think about and analyse without having to drive down to Bloemfontein to shoot anyone.

I'm making a fetish of my uncertainty about Jansen and the Jansen issue because it has occurred to me recently - thinking about Jansen and reading the verbal fall-out that followed his speech  - that one of the hallmarks of local public debate in recent years is that these days everyone is so damn certain about everything.

Maybe it's part of the Polokwane Syndrome (PS). After all, if you're Zwelinzima Vavi or Blade Nzimande or Fikile Mbalula or Little Julie, and you were indeed correct about who would grasp the battered crown in December 2007, then you think you're right about everything. Not much scepticism or thoughtful debate - about anything - floating around south of the Limpopo these days, is there?

But veteran political writer Patrick Laurence remains thoughtful and he set me right.

In his column in The Star on Tuesday, 27 October, Laurence pointed out that a re-reading of Jansen's speech showed, first, that Jansen was making the point that the behaviour of the Reitz four had not been a manifestation of "individual pathology" but a sign of institutional failure - in other words, the Reitz four were largely products of their environment; and, second, that Jansen had not tried to distance himself from UFS but had said mea culpa, even though "he could easily have exculpated himself from blame and distanced himself self-righteously from the past episodes of racism at the university".

Frans Cronje of the Institute of Race Relations had also picked up on this, pointing out that "[i]n an extraordinary example of leadership, Professor Jansen then took it upon himself to apologise to every person that had ever been a victim of discrimination by his university. He also apologised to South Africa for the role that the university had played during apartheid.

"In the early 1990s," Cronje continued, "apologies for apartheid were a dime a dozen. Every one time apartheid supporter and his dog were apologising for apartheid with what often appeared to be limited sincerity. But this was different, as here was a black man assuming the responsibility for what the white guard had done before him, and apologising to the country for that. There was no malice in his apology and no suggestion that his responsibility in leading the university was in any way mitigated by what had come before him."

Fair enough. But still ... but still what?

This: there is too much of an air of showmanship about Jansen's announcement that the university would not proceed with disciplinary action against the four little putzes who had humiliated five black cleaning staffers. Apologise by all means. But you cannot harness - you cannot colonise - the experiences of five other human beings for the purposes of your grand gesture as the new rector. It's as insensitive as taking away someone's scriptures and giving them to someone else.

Yes, I know the five cleaning staffers - Naomi Phororo, Emmah Koko, Nkgapeng Adams, Sebusengwe Ntlatseng and Mothibedi Molete - have doubtless been taken under the gentle and kind wing of their union representative. So, even if they were interested in or inclined towards forgiveness, it's doubtless too late for them. But Jansen should have found a way of getting to them - of communicating to them what he was trying to do. A trifle insensitive to have left them out - like pawns in a bigger game, as Bob Dylan sang in a 1964 song about Medgar Evers.

And talking of forgiveness and reconciliation - if that were really Jansen's driving motive, then he could have achieved this quietly and on a personal level. If he had really wanted to do so, he could have met the nine people involved - with their various representatives present - and sorted something out.

Finally, I don't know about you. But I would still like to know precisely what the Reitz four did and what the states of mind were of all the people involved. One can't, alas, entirely trust the good ol' media. In yet other words, Jansen should have let this matter go to court before he used it for his inaugural address.

It was a courageous and admirable move on Jansen's part. But I'm sure that someone famous - Machiavelli, Bob Dylan, Vo Nguyen Giap, maybe Paul Trewhela - must have stated somewhere that, even if one is filled with the milk of human kindness, one has to pick one's battles very carefully, or face the massed and voluble criticism of Bozos United, which is exactly what is happening to poor Jansen.

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter