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. ...