Virginia S. Yans is well known for advising what she calls her “rainbow children” — more than a dozen diverse, first-generation Ph.D. students who have gone through Rutgers University’s history department. As a historian who specializes in gender and immigration, she has trained many such students over the past few decades.
I am one of those rainbow children. We came from working-class or immigrant families: African-American like me, white, Italian-American, Argentinian, Hungarian-Filipino, Lebanese-Cuban, and students who make their homes in Japan and Korea. Many of us entered graduate school feeling uncertain of our place in the academy and afraid that professors would not understand how important our identities were to our research agendas.
The first and most obvious place I looked for a dissertation adviser was among black women, but surprisingly, I found the climate and sensitivity I needed for personal and intellectual growth in this tiny woman who did not share my skin color.
“You don’t have to surrender your identity to mentor,” Ms. Yans says. “The objective of teaching is to step back and allow the student to discover their voice, not mine; their agenda, not mine. That’s not simply a matter of skin color.”
Ms. Yans’s students chose her, consciously or not, as our mentor because we found echoes of our own worlds in her thinking and acting, just as she had found them in the 1970s in her own graduate-school adviser, the famous labor and race historian Herbert Gutman. Her own experience growing up as a child of working-class Italian immigrants living in a 1950s jumble of class, ethnic, and race differences in Mamaroneck, N.Y., enabled her, perhaps subconsciously, to recreate her neighborhood through her diverse students.
“I was one of a coterie of students who heard the call to arms from Gutman and others of his generation to rewrite the conventional ‘big white man’ narrative,” she says, “redirecting chronologies and narratives away from war- and Constitution-making toward stories of working-class culture, slavery, immigration, women, sexuality, family, and popular culture.”
The following is an edited excerpt of a conversation with Yans.
What do you enjoy most about being a graduate adviser?
I enjoy working closely, one to one, with a student, encouraging him or her to allow his or her creativity and ideas to take formation, and finally, seeing them complete this very difficult task.
What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered when mentoring first-generation graduate students?
At a program such as ours at Rutgers, which has a competitive admissions process, ill-prepared students are rare. But several of the students I have advised did have some issues.
Writing skills are the biggest issue. For foreign students, particularly Asian students who tend to have less English-language proficiency, language is often an issue.
I think confidence issues are prominent because students who are first-generation often come from backgrounds that are not typical for many students in the humanities. Given that I come from a working-class family, I have a lot of sympathy for them.
Can you talk about the challenges you’ve faced as a white adviser interacting so closely with nonwhite graduate students? Did you ever have any misgivings or things you had to push past to mentor diverse students?
Almost all graduate students I have known stand in awe of their professors, less so if they come from Ivy or other elite schools and less so if they come from highly educated families. Several of the students I have mentored had to learn how to negotiate dealing with such an “awesome” being as a university professor.
If there is a cultural or racial difference, it becomes even more difficult.
So at the outset of the relationship there is a lot of anxiety at play. Students have to build trust and confidence in you and in the relationship they develop with you. After the student feels safe working with me, my goal is to encourage him or her to take chances, to follow their own light, to believe in their own interests, to develop self-confidence.
I have to constantly observe my own interaction with the student. Am I doing the best I can to help this student realize his or her potential? Some students believe that they have to work with someone of their own ethnic or racial background. I don’t believe that is necessary. But that is the student’s choice. We are going to interact differently if we are of different race, ethnic, or class backgrounds, just as we interact differently if we are of different genders.
I also try to make the student aware of his or her “own voice” and how it will be received within the academy and, if the student is lucky enough to find a larger audience, outside the academy. I may agree, for example, that women, gay people, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and immigrants are discriminated against, but ranting about that is not convincing. It is not the scholar’s voice.
Some students react badly to that upfront advice. Each student has to figure out how and to whom they want to speak. The student must make that judgment, not me.
Some students cannot negotiate or don’t want to negotiate these kinds of challenges because, I believe, they are not yet sure of their identity. Or perhaps they are sure of their identity but want to put their energy elsewhere, not in working through interracial situations.
How did you overcome the challenges of interracial differences between you and your students?
Students want help. When they get substantial help and attention, when they see that a mentor is providing a “safe space” for them to work in, their trust and confidence grows, the relationship flourishes. The student can concentrate on the work at hand instead of worrying about inadequacy and being misunderstood because of differences.
Both the student and myself feel invigorated when some intellectual or writing obstacle is overcome. We become closer working partners, and differences recede into the background. Or, as often happens, learning about differences in the mentor/mentee relationship causes the student to project this learning into their intellectual work and, in the case of my discipline, history, to obtain a more sophisticated understanding of difference in the past.
What are some of the practical things you’ve done to help your first-generation students achieve success?
It is especially satisfying to work with African-American students. It’s like seeing generations of harm, all the impediments they and their ancestors have suffered from, undone. I like working with students who are a challenge, that is, with potentially “high impact” situations.
When I work with white ethnic students, the children of first- and second-generation working-class parents who have never been to college, I totally get where they are coming from, and how they are suffering and worrying about whether or not they are good enough. That was my own experience. So if a student comes from a well-off or middle-class white family and graduated from an Ivy, they are already on fast-forward. I am happy to work with them, but it is simply not as challenging or as satisfying.
It is quite simple, really: When the student succeeds, I feel I have made an impact upon another human being’s life, and I am confident that the student, having experienced such a relationship, will do the same for his or her students. It is a legacy we are participating in.
Practical things: generosity with time, patience, listening, working, sometimes endlessly it seems, with writing and revising, listening with what one famous psychologist called “the third ear.” That means trying to figure out what the student is trying to say in his or her work but is having difficulties articulating.
Are there popular myths or misconceptions about first-generation graduate students?
Yes, I think that they are often seen as less competent, less able to achieve than students who come to us already “polished.” Mentors such as myself like the “diamond in the rough” type of student.
My brother and I were recently discussing the kinds of people he would look to hire at a very prestigious business-consulting firm.
He told me that he found students from Harvard less interesting than students from other high-end schools because the other students were more diverse in their background, more interesting bearers of interesting ideas.
What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to graduate advisers who are mentoring students in an increasingly diverse academic culture?
Get ready to spend more time than you do on the already polished gems. It is worth it.
