Professor Whittier isn’t afraid to act her age. She likes to tell her classes, “I’m in my seventies, and I’ve earned every single one of those years. I’ve seen everything.” And when it comes to our school, she really has. Whittier began teaching at Binghamton University in the fall of 1969, which makes this her 45th year here. She’s seen the University change drastically from a small liberal arts college to the multifaceted, ever-expanding public university it is today.

“I started teaching at Harpur College, and then it was SUNY Center at Binghamton, then SUNY at Binghamton, and now it’s Binghamton University. So it’s sort of like a much married university,” she joked from her office, a cozy study with a well-stocked bookshelf and a miniature portrait of Shakespeare. “When I started teaching, the general atmosphere was of people who were liberal arts-based in their endeavors and sensibilities, even. Now it’s much more varied, and it will become even more so in the future.”

Professor Whittier’s lectures are certainly diamonds in the rough of academia. She’s known across campus for her free-form style of teaching English that makes Shakespeare feel not just applicable, but important in daily life. It’s impossible to deconstruct her lectures into a bulleted PowerPoint that you can regurgitate into a bluebook on exam day. Her lectures are unique, engaging and interwoven with intelligent insights into Shakespeare’s works, as well as amusing narratives from her own life.

Professor Whittier describes her teaching process as thinking about Shakespeare’s plays creatively.

“I wasn’t suckered in by new historicism,” Whittier said. “I’m not interested in cultural context, and how it implies race, gender and capitalism, I don’t think that’s a good way to understand any artifact. I think my teaching, my whole life has gone towards the sense of ‘How was this made? What is this thing?’ I’m always looking for the thing that Emily Dickinson said about the top of your head coming off when you read the great poems. I’m interested in the power in a poem.”

And while she seems so comfortable teaching, professor Whittier is far from complacent in the realm of academia. Rather, she’s wary of how the focus has changed over the years, shifting from creative to material-based productivity.

“I call myself a victim of academia, or a recovering academic, as in ‘AA: Academics Anonymous,’” Whittier said. “There’s been a radical culture change in academe. From a faculty standpoint, the focus has shifted on material productivity, so that in my department if you don’t have a book published or under contract by the time you come up for tenure, you won’t get tenure. I think that that’s a kind of commodification of intellect. I’m all in favor of intellect, but I suppose my quarrel is really with certain types of scholarship all together. I would say the University as a corporate entity wants the labor and the material product of it, the same way as if you were making a chair.”

Whittier’s own education began at Middlebury College. She left, got married, and finished her degree four years later at the University of Buffalo. She went on to attend graduate school at Cornell University, getting her doctorate in 1969. It was there that her “arranged marriage” with Shakespeare began.

“When I went to graduate school at Cornell I wanted to work with 17th-century prose, and I was very attracted to sermons in particular,” Whittier recalled. “But as it happened, the person who was the head of that department was someone I couldn’t have worked with, someone who believed that you couldn’t write about something if others had written about it in the mainstream. I wanted to write about Donne’s sermons, but a book had recently been written about them, and he refused to let me write about something that was in the mainstream. He gave me only two topics: the case of conscience, and the poetry of failed pleasure, and by that he meant a subgenre of poetry about sexuality, what was usually literally like orgasm counting. I was in despair because I didn’t really want to write on either of these topics.”

A former professor suggested she write about Shakespeare. Her answer was simple: OK.

“So yeah, it was somewhat like an arranged marriage,” Whittier added.

Looking back on it, however, she isn’t so sure she would’ve made the same choice had she known what she was getting into.

“I wonder now whether if I had given it more thought if I would’ve said yes because, while I like Shakespeare, and I’m awfully glad that I’ve spent this long with it, if I had thought about it a little longer and seen all the bookshelves full of stuff written about Shakespeare, would I have said yes? I don’t know.”

Despite the unexpected pairing, Whittier is happy about where she gave her attention. Next semester, she will be teaching a 300-level class entitled “Shakespeare’s Histories.”

“What I love about Shakespeare is that there is always something new to discover in the text,” Whittier said. “Since my graduate work, I have been lucky that I found so many other things that I love, and that I love to teach, and I’m happy.”