Grad Profile: Vanity Jenkins

As a teenager, Vanity Jenkins fantasized about living a glamorous life as an NBA player’s wife. But once she arrived at Rutgers in 2006, she realized how empty a goal that was.

“I started taking classes in women’s and gender studies that raised my consciousness about my history as a black woman,” Jenkins says. “I realized I had a lot more to offer to the world.” 

So, Jenkins set out to remake herself. This month, she graduates with a double major in  women’s and gender studies and Africana studies and has been accepted by Teach for America  to work in rural Mississippi.

Jenkins says she owes a great deal to her professors and mentors who helped her on the way, particularly head women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer, for whom she worked as a team manager all four years at Rutgers.

When Jenkins was younger, her family lived in Iowa and her parents brought her to many basketball games, where she rarely saw a person of color. One night Jenkins recalls yelling excitedly to her father, “Look Dad, there’s an African-American coach!” Sure enough, it was Stringer, who was coaching at the University of Iowa before she came to Rutgers in 1995. Stringer inspired Jenkins to start playing basketball, which she continued after her family moved to New Jersey. In fifth grade she took Stringer’s summer camp and eventually became captain of her high school team.  

So when Jenkins saw a job opening for a team manager during her first semester at Rutgers, she had to apply and Stringer hired her – as the only freshman manager on the team that year. 

Jenkins can’t imagine a better role model.  “ She’s a woman who came up during a time when women, especially black women, couldn’t do anything,” Jenkins said. “I know now that I have the power and the tools available to accomplish the goals I want to.”

Stringer was not the only influence on Jenkins at Rutgers. While taking Africana studies courses, she became interested in social inequities within education.

She recalls her anger after learning that policymakers take into account the test scores of African-American boys in third grade when planning the number of jail cells to be built at federal prisons.

“After hearing this, I decided I wanted to become a third grade teacher to raise the literacy of African-American children,” Jenkins says. She later realized she could have more impact by working to change education policy.

During her junior year, she found out about a program that could help her develop the skills to do this: the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL), which nurtures young women leaders.  Since last semester, Jenkins and others have met monthly to mentor middle school girls in the New Brunswick area through “The Bee Real Project.”  The initiative uses art and literature in a series of workshops that explore ideas about self esteem and leadership. The novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is used to stimulate discussion about learning and self-worth.

In another IWL project, Jenkins worked with a team of five students to make a documentary film called Transforming Lives. Each student interviewed a remarkable woman leader and prepared a short film. She chose Stringer. On film, Jenkins has been able to capture through Stringer “what it takes to be a graceful and compassionate woman leader who never thinks of herself as being too important to help others.”

Jenkins will heed those words as she goes on to affect change in education policy, whether through politics, teaching, administration, or writing a book. She hopes that one day she will fulfill another dream: open a boarding school for poor children.

Mary Trigg, who directs leadership programs and research at IWL, has no doubt Jenkins will accomplish her goals. “Vanity is a young woman and a leader who takes advantage of opportunities when they’re offered and makes the most of them,” Trigg said, “It has led her to places where she wouldn’t have gone.”