After completing 27 years at Shippensburg University, Shari Horner has a great deal to be proud of.

Horner served for four years as the irector of the Women’s Studies Program, which became the Women’s and Gender Studies Program under her watch, and she was the chair of the English Department for nine years. 

She has received the Vagina Warrior award for her advocacy of the Vagina Monologues event, and is a two-time recipient of the Gero Award, honoring those who have made a remarkable contribution to the status of women on Shippensburg University’s campus.

As Horner reflected on her time at Shippensburg, she shared that much has changed since she first stepped foot on campus.

“I finished my dissertation in 1993, and I got a job at a university in Nebraska, and my husband got a job at Shippensburg University. We moved across the country from each other and were apart for two years,” Horner said. “After two years, I decided to take a leave from that job and got an adjunct job at Dickinson College. Then, I got a job at Penn State Mont Alto, and then the medievalist retired at Shippensburg, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Horner shared that there was a profound difference in the campus culture when she first arrived at Shippensburg.

“When I first arrived at Ship, our department had a lot more people in it. It was just busier,” Horner said. “We had a lot more money and brought in great speakers. It was a really vibrant place. Ship has had a lot of financial challenges over the years, and the pandemic hurt every university. It’s a lot quieter, and we’re a lot more stretched.”

The volume of students and faculty was not the only difference on campus at that time.

“The other thing that was different in the English Department was that it was not a very friendly place in the past,” Horner said. “There were a lot of factions, a lot of infighting, and a lot of different camps with different opinions. It’s taken a long time for the English department to gain a sense of real trust and build collegiality with each other.”

Horner observed that the turning point that began to build bridges in the department was the acceptance and normalizing of family in the workplace. “Ship had very few female professors, and nobody I knew had a baby. I went to a women’s consortium event with my toddler, and everyone had acted like I had committed the worst sin,” Horner said. 

“It was not a very family-friendly place to work, and I think that’s really different now. I think it’s great for faculty to have a job that accommodates families, and I think it’s great for students to see that faculty are humans,” Horner said.

Horner shared that she felt motivated to pursue medieval literature during her undergraduate studies after traveling to Europe. “I was a double major in French and English during my undergraduate studies and studied abroad in France,” Horner said. “What I loved about medieval literature was that it blends English and French, and there is so much interaction between those two. It was a really good fit for me. I like medieval literature because it’s so exotic. It seems so weird and hard, and I just like that about it.”

Horner’s book, “The Disclosure of Enclosure,” explores gender and representation in Old English literature. Horner felt inspired to branch out into that subject during her graduate studies when the application of feminist work to literary studies began to garner more attention. 

“It was really a time in the 1980s and ‘90s that feminist work in literary studies was exploding. It was exciting and new, and people hadn’t talked about those ideas before,” Horner said. “But I was surrounded by grad students who were doing that work, and I loved it. My advisor was skeptical, but he let me continue studying it, and it was nice to be doing something new.”

Horner’s dedication to her studies made her begin to ponder about how it applied to women’s work. “I was just really interested in this concept in Old English called the peace-weaver. It’s a way in which a woman, through marriage, joins opposing groups of people,” Horner said. “The idea of weaving things together became really interesting to me. That made me interested to think of women’s work in terms of weaving in textiles.”

Throughout Horner’s career at Shippensburg, she has been able to observe a gradual ease in how the campus approaches the study of literature and gender. “I think it’s very normalized now,” Horner said. 

“The women’s literature course used to be such an outlier. I think everyone is integrating women’s literature and LGBTQ+ literature into their work without suggesting it needs its own separate space. The English department has hired a lot of faculty who are really committed to diversifying the curriculum, and we have just moved it from margin to center. I think that’s slowly happening across the university, as well,” Horner said.

After serving as the Chair of the English department for nearly a decade, Horner shared there were both challenges and triumphs of leading the department.

“There were a lot of factions within the university, and it wasn’t always a happy place to work,” Horner said. “I was really pleased that I was able to create a more collegial and supportive environment. Naturally, there needed to be some turnover for that to happen, but I worked hard to make it a good place for people to come to work. I think people appreciate feeling like their work was valued, and I think my colleagues would agree that it’s a much nicer place to work now than it was back then,” Horner said. Many members of the English department came to support Horner during her presentation at the annual Spring Faculty Colloquium. 

During her time as the Director of the Women’s Studies program, she oversaw its transition to the Women’s and Gender Studies program. 

“That was a big one for me,” Horner said. “In 2025, that doesn’t seem like such a radical thing to do, but there were some people that were really angry about that idea in 2009. People felt that it would dilute the emphasis of women, and there were some contentious meetings about that, but what it has meant is that it has allowed us to be more expansive in terms of whose voices we hear, value, and teach. Also, you can’t talk about women without talking about gender. It allows us to acknowledge that.

“We were always talking about things that were gender-specific, like the wage gap, so why not just say it? We put a lot of work into that effort, but it still took a lot to make that happen,” Horner said. “I think that’s been great for the university, and I haven’t regretted that one bit. It’s nice now that it’s just the normal thing to do.”

Upon being asked what one of the most meaningful moments she has had during her career, Horner smiled at the thought of one particular movement on campus. “Probably the Plan B vending machine,” Horner said.

The first known emergency contraception vending machine in the nation, offering Plan B, was installed at Shippensburg University in 2012, offering it for $25. 

“There were people who worked in Etter Health Center who would not dispense Plan-B because they had religious objections to it, and that was also true for a number of pharmacies in town. Even if a student had a prescription, they just refused to do it,” Horner said. “The solution that the university came up with was the Plan B vending machine.”

“It let the healthcare workers off the hook, it gave students control and it was accessible and affordable. Since then, many more universities have installed them,” Horner said. Boston University installed a vending machine dispensing emergency contraception on campus in March 2022.

“It ran successfully for a while, and then someone somewhere got wind of it and started a hate-filled, vitriolic campaign against Shippensburg University. It was unbelievably nasty stuff,” Horner said. “The President and the Dean of Students were receiving unbelievably bad phone calls. There was a lot of pressure to get rid of it.” 

In the wake of the negative reception to the vending machine, Horner needed to provide a bit of extra education to the university’s administration about contraception misconceptions. 

“President Bill Ruud called in myself and Stephanie Erdice, who was the Director of the Women’s Center at that time. We met with him a few times and needed to educate him on what Plan B actually does, whether or not it causes abortions–which of course, it does not–but it was new to them. They didn’t know the ins and outs. Steph and I said, ‘Well, here’s how Plan B works.’”

Horner and Erdice did not mind educating the administration, as they discovered it was more necessary than they initially thought. 

“There was a lot of misconceptions about the biology of it, so I think that was helpful. I think the discussion on Plan-B was not as normalized as it is now,” Horner said. “I hope the current administration would have the courage to support the health of our students.”

Horner and Erdice’s input was well received and aided the administration during the blowback, helping to support the existence of the vending machine. “They really listened to Steph and I and did the right thing. That was a hard choice for them to make, because they were receiving so much external pressure to remove it,” Horner said. “Phone calls at home, hate mail, you name it. But they trusted us and what the students wanted. So that was a difficult decision that they made that I respected, and it took people from all over the university to make that happen.

Another highlight of Horner’s time at Shippensburg University was receiving the Gero Award–twice. “I was really shocked to have won the Gero Award twice,” Horner said. “The Gero Award has such a legacy of being awarded to so many amazing women on our campus. The woman it was named after was such a powerful woman on campus. It was definitely one of the highlights of my career,” Horner said.

In Horner’s career at Shippensburg, she has observed numerous advancements and drawbacks in the future of gender equity on campus. “We used to have a Women’s Center on campus, and it got folded into the PAGE Center. The PAGE Center does excellent work, but we have decreased the number of programs and resources that are available,” Horner said.

“I understand the reasoning behind it and why things have to change due to budgeting. I love the work that the PAGE Center is doing, but I’m sad that the Women’s Center got folded into that,” Horner said.

“On the other hand, I think the persistence of the enduringness of the Women’s and Gender Studies program makes me feel hopeful. I think Dr. Knight has really worked hard and done such amazing work. It’s a lot more work than it seems, so the fact that the program is so stable and constant on our campus is so important,” Horner said.

“The fact that we continue to offer Women’s and Gender studies as a gen ed class makes me hopeful. We’ve all valued the work that came before us that helped to build that class. When students fill out their evaluations, they say, ‘Everyone should be required to take this class.’ I’ve read that for almost 20 years on student evaluations” Horner said. “Hardly anyone says that about Academic Writing.”

Horner views the gen ed course, Women’s and Gender Studies 100, to be necessary to take as it helps students to navigate their lives. “Unlike other classes, that class teaches you about how to live your life and go about the world, no matter your gender. That’s the most important thing right now,” Horner said.

One aspect of Horner’s career is experiencing the culture of college students. “I love college students,” Horner said. “It’s such an exciting time in your life. College students are at a really interesting transitional time in their life where they have to make important decisions, but they’re not necessarily permanent decisions. That brink of adulthood is a really interesting time to me,” Horner said.

Horner was also pleased to observe the lasting impact her lectures have had on her students over the years. “I have friends on Facebook friends who were my students in the Women’s and Gender Studies seminar course I taught 15 years ago, and they still talk about research papers they wrote and topics that I taught,” It’s such a great experience to be in a group of people who come together and are passionate about what you’re talking about. “

Beyond the syllabus, Horner hopes that her students have absorbed a passion for academia and sympathy for others. “I hope they’ve taken away a passion for learning. I hope they continue to read books and keep learning hard things,” Horner said. “I hope they are unafraid of challenges and that they don’t quit, and fight for other people, and take care of each other.”

As Horner looks forward to retirement, she reflects on her departure from Shippensburg through a bittersweet lens. “I feel like I’m on my farewell tour,” Horner said. “It’s a little emotional, but it’s really exciting. I’ve been here a long time, and the idea of starting a new chapter is great. I have an idea that I could work in a museum or a bookstore or a library,” Horner said.

As the future of higher education is unclear, Horner urges the Shippensburg community not to give up on the future of our campus. “Keep fighting for Ship. Higher education is under a lot of threats right now, and Ship has a lot of challenges,” Horner said. “But it’s worth fighting for, and everybody should do that. It’s easy to get mad and frustrated, and I do, too. But it’s a good place that has a lot of value to students who go here,” Horner said.

When reflecting on her experience at Shippensburg, her experience enlightening the lives of her students and improving the campus climate have been her proudest achievements. “I’m most proud of my work with the students. I’m proud of the leadership that I’ve done here, both with the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the English program.” Horner said. “I’ve had five or six thousand students, and I’m proud of having that impact on students’ lives.”

Share