2006 Committee on Education and Training Awards (E&T Awards)

Janet E. Helms

Janet E. Helms was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where she resided for the first 22 years of her life. Her mother, Elteser worked her way up from silver polisher to top sales person at Kriegel’s Diamond Shop and instilled in her the value that much can be accomplished from the lowliest of positions in life. While she knew him, her father, Brown J. Helms worked as a laborer in Wilson’s Packinghouse, although before she was born, he was also a decorated navy veteran in World War II, which was an unusual accomplishment for a Black American man. Both of her parents loved books and the written word and taught her a love of the same. Helms has four brothers, Jerry Brown, Joel, Jerone, and Jason. Jerry and Jerone died of coronary heart disease prior to their 50th birthdays, which makes her the oldest survivor of her sibling generation. She has two sisters Jacalyn Mindell and Jennifer Helms. She is not married, but occasionally considers the possibility.

Helms earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC). There was only one other Black student in the psychology department while she was there and they did not like each other very much. She had no mentors, finished in three years, while working full time. She was the first in her extended family to graduate from a four-year college, although her older brother actually obtained a degree from the same university after graduating from a community college. Having nothing else to do, she entered the master’s program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. It was not fun; so she stopped out after finishing all of the requirements except comprehensive examinations and a thesis.

For awhile, she worked as a research assistant in Robert Bechtel’s ecological center, doing what would now be called qualitative research. Qualitative research requires a patient personality, which she did not have. So, even though the focus of the research she was involved in concerned poverty and the causes of race riots in Kansas City, coding data did not capture her interests. One day she accidentally conducted and interpreted an analysis of variance for Dr. Bechtel and he was so amazed that she decided that maybe she should continue her graduate education, although not at UMKC.

Based on two research papers she had written as an undergraduate, which surprised them a lot, two of her professors Morton Goldman and William Hillix, had independently recommended that she should consider graduate school. However, since she had no idea how to do that, she thought that she would seek advice from her ostensible advisor. However, on the way to his office, she saw a sign on the departmental bulletin board that said, “Would you like to go to graduate school?” Since this is exactly what she thought she wanted to do, she took one of the information postcards beneath the sign and thus began her stint at Iowa State University (ISU).

It should be noted that ISU took a chance on her given that she could only find two people in the academic world who knew her well enough to write even a bad letter of recommendation and the acceptance letter from ISU said, in effect, “Students with your GREs can sometimes be successful.” Helms was the only Black person in the department and apparently the only Black person some of her professors had encountered. She grew tired of explaining to her White friends why her professors called her “Miss Helms,” but called them by their first names. She also grew tired of parents explaining to their children that people naturally came in many colors and of White strangers welcoming her to campus. It is likely that the seeds of her White racial identity theory began at ISU.

It is also likely that her interest in test bias has its seeds in her graduate experiences. During her first week in developmental class, she was assigned to lead the con argument against Jensen’s perspective on race and test bias. It occurred to her that her peers who were assigned the pro position had a much easier time of it, perhaps because they did not know any Black people. In any case, she wrote her masters thesis for UMKC on the topic of biographical influences on test scores.

While in graduate school, she had no traditional mentors, but she was a watcher and learned a lot in that way. For instance, Donald Zytowski submitted a paper to a journal that she had written for an independent study with him, from which she learned how to submit papers for publication. Fred Borgen let her edit one of his research papers on the Strong Interest Inventory, from which she became intrigued by multivariate statistics. Roy Warman, her academic advisor, consistently found jobs for her in the counseling center so that she could support herself though graduate school. Ellen Betz provided a safe environment for a little while.

When she graduated from ISU after many trials, she became the first African American woman to graduate from the psychology program. Another did not graduate until ten years later. Her first position was at Washington State University (WSU) at Pullman, Washington. She held a joint position in the Counseling Center and the Education Department. At WSU, although she taught the counseling practicum and supervised interns at WSU while receiving supervision herself, she most enjoyed supervising the research projects for her master’s students’ theses. These experiences gave her an opportunity to provide a supportive environment for especially students of color and non-dominant languages to accomplish feats that they thought were beyond them.

After almost three years at WSU, she left to join the faculty at Southern Illinois University (SIU). Since then her primary professional positions have been in academic environments, but she has attempted to continue to keep a foot in the scientific as well as the practitioner worlds by teaching counseling courses, such as counseling practica or maintaining a private practice, as well as supervising research. Nevertheless, it is in the area of research mentoring that she has probably made her major contributions. At SIU, she won no teaching awards, but she supervised the doctoral dissertations of most of the class that entered the same year as she did as well as the research of a significant number in successive classes. Each of these students has gone on to careers of distinction in teaching, practice, or administration from a scholarly perspective.

She received and accepted a job offer from the psychology department of the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), where she remained for almost 20 years. At UMCP, she was promoted again to Associate Professor (a rank which she had earned previously at SIU) and then to Full Professor. She published her first article on Black-and-White racial identity theory during her early ears at UMCP, which was eventually followed by her book on the same theme, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice. In the book, she introduced two measures of racial identity, which provided a means to quantify racial identity development as a psychological construct(s). Many of her students at Maryland have expanded her interests in the identity development of various racial and ethnic groups. She trained over 40 doctoral students at UMCP, mostly students of color, who have published extensively themselves and have become well known for their own conceptual frameworks. Some have remained in contact and are good friends. Teachers College, Columbia University established an award in her name, the Janet E. Helms Award, in recognition of her mentoring to date.

In 2000, Helms joined the faculty at Boston College and founded the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture (ISPRC). The goal of ISPRC is to bring a scientific perspective to the study and practice of race and culture.

Helms insists that much of her success can be attributed to her students with whom she has worked throughout her professional lifetime. She credits students with believing in her ideas and working to make them a reality when no one else did. It is tempted to name them because each contributed significantly to the quality of her professional life. However, because there were so many, she has decided not to name any for fear of hurting the feelings of someone who was equally meritorious in her opinion.

Helms is presently the Augustus Long Professor at Boston College and continues to work as the founding director of ISPRC.