Australian Dictionary of Biography

Douglas Alan Jecks (1928–1999), educationist and university vice-chancellor, was born on 16 January 1928 at Guildford, Perth, eldest of three children of locally born parents Percy Robert Jecks, garage proprietor, and his wife Ethel Ivy May, née Baker. Douglas attended Guildford State School (1934–39), and from an early age was credited with a strong appetite for education, especially in mathematics. He obtained his Junior certificate at Midland High School (1940–42), gaining entry to Perth Modern School where he received his Leaving certificate.

On 30 January 1945 Jecks joined the Education Department of Western Australia as a monitor at his former primary school in Guildford. The following year he enrolled at Claremont Teachers’ College, while simultaneously studying at the University of Western Australia (BA, 1952; BEd, 1958). His first teaching appointment was to a one-teacher school at Tullis, south of Perth (1948–50). At the Church of Christ, Bassendean, on 16 December 1950, he married Western Australian-born Joan Audrey Smyth, and the following year moved back to Perth to work as a demonstration assistant at East Claremont State School. Over the next ten years a string of appointments and promotions followed: head teacher and then headmaster at the Carnarvon Mission School (1952–55); deputy headmaster at Richmond Training School (1956); and headmaster at Kewdale Training School (1957) and the Junior High School, Esperance (1958–61). At Esperance he collaborated with a talented local teacher, Pauline Grewar, to publish a series of books primarily to aid the teaching of literacy.

Jecks became senior lecturer (practice) at Claremont Teachers’ College in January 1962, nominally retaining the position while he studied education administration at Columbia University, New York (EdD, 1964; MA, 1964; Professional Diploma in Education Administration, 1964) with the assistance of a Fulbright postgraduate scholarship. On his return to Western Australia in 1965 he became district superintendent of education in the Eastern Goldfields region and continued to publish jointly with Grewar, before being appointed senior lecturer in education at the University of Sydney in March 1968.

In December 1971 Jecks became inaugural principal of the new Churchlands Teachers’ College, Perth, and in 1981 he was appointed director of the newly created Western Australian College of Advanced Education (WACAE) with the challenging task of amalgamating four local campuses: Claremont, Nedlands, Mount Lawley, and Churchlands. Despite his record of strong leadership and exceptional academic qualifications, a lack of transparency and due process surrounding his appointment led to speculation that his long-standing association with the Liberal Party’s Western Australian division had influenced his appointment. He strenuously rejected claims that he had used his political connections in his appointment and subsequent amalgamations but, living up to his not-entirely affectionate nickname of ‘Hungry Jecks’ (McIlwraith 1999, 18), he ensured that his Churchlands campus emerged as the new college’s head office.

WACAE staff and students protested at what they viewed as Jecks’s tendency to overreach. The shadow education minister, Robert Pearce, told the State parliament that ‘he feels that dissension needs to be crushed and is known to do that’ (WA LA 1982, 5864). Consistent with his determined and sometimes autocratic approach, when the State government declined to fund the purchase of land for an additional WACAE campus at Joondalup in the northern suburbs, he used the college’s own funds to provide the $1.15 million required. Nevertheless, WACAE emerged as a cohesive and dedicated institution, with much of this success attributable to its headstrong director. In the process, he established off-campus training for Aboriginal teachers in Broome, Carnarvon, Kalgoorlie, and Kununurra.

Notwithstanding his idiosyncrasies, Jecks was in demand as an educationist and administrator, becoming a member of the Western Australian State Library Board (1975–83), including as chairman (1982–83); member of the Advanced Education Council (1981–84); chairman of the Australian Conference of Principals of Colleges of Advanced Education (1981); and chairman of the Western Australian Council for Special Education from 1976.

Under the Hawke Federal Labor government’s education policy reforms from the late 1980s, which encouraged colleges of advanced education to transform into universities, WACAE became Edith Cowan University in January 1991. Jecks, whom Geoff Gallop, the State minister for education (1990–91), had come to recognise as a formidable administrator, was appointed as its first vice-chancellor. Jecks’s unorthodox recruitment strategies for the new institution included regularly travelling the world, with executive assistants on hand, seeking talented staff whom he would appoint without delay.

In January 1993 Jecks retired as vice-chancellor, soon after he had secured Liberal Party endorsement for the State seat of Floreat. Perceived as being aligned with a right-wing faction of the party, at the February general election he incurred a two-party preferred swing against him of nearly 33 per cent, with the seat retained by the sitting independent member, Elizabeth Constable. Later that year he unsuccessfully stood for election to the Edith Cowan University council. He continued to publish school educational books and supply materials, and became an enthusiastic but part-time participant in Abacus Fisheries, a commercial fishing business established in Dongara and then Carnarvon with his son, Peter.

Jecks was unswervingly committed to the power of good education to enable others to gain the benefits he had experienced through education. He was wedded to the structured, systematic teaching of literacy and numeracy, promoting such pedagogical strategies both as a public educator and as a private publisher. In August 1999 he was seriously injured in a car accident in Perth. After five weeks in a coma, he died on 1 October, survived by his wife Joan, their son Peter, and two grandchildren. He is memorialised at the Karrakatta cemetery with a seat bearing his name, and honoured with a portrait by Linda van Der Merwe in the possession of Edith Cowan University.