Amplifying Diverse Voices Makes This Politics Professor Tick
By Danna Lorch
A historic presidential election. Complex issues. A concerned nation.
It may sound like 2024, but it was also true of the fall of 2008—what was Associate Professor of Politics Susanne Beechey’s first semester at Whitman College.
Beechey was teaching a course that closely followed the race between Barack Obama and John McCain, pivoting each class meeting’s focus to respond to daily news and live debates.
In that historic season, she grasped how her classroom could serve as a stage for respectful discussions, as well as making mistakes, discovering and posing tough questions that the country is grappling with in real-time.
“From then on, I learned to be flexible and willing to shift each class where it needs to go,” Beechey says. “I think of them as ongoing projects. A syllabus is never completed. I’m always adding new material.”
Thinking Deeply & Clarifying Perspectives
In 2022, Beechey made another timely academic move in response to a landmark decision by the country’s highest court. Beechey quickly received her department’s approval to pilot a new class—POL 250: Reproduction and the State—when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was leaked in the press and it became evident that the Constitution would no longer safeguard the right to an abortion.
“The Dobbs decision marked a pivot point that would have many cascading effects. It was important for my students and me to carve out an academic space to think through all of it,” Beechey says.
In that class and her other courses, Beechey consciously poses questions that challenge assumptions and helps her students clarify their own perspectives.
For example, in her POL 365: Political Economy of Care/Work course, students reflect on the dynamics of who raised them, the external pressures their caregivers faced and their own lived experiences as caregivers. Last semester’s cohort included four working parents—Beechey, the mom of two school-age boys, was one of them.
“We intentionally thought through the way that power has worked in our lives, analyzed the idea of constrained choice in caregiving and imagined how public policy could open up higher quality choices,” she says.
“Whitman students passionately open up about issues they care about and willingly engage with and learn from one another.
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Susanne Beechey, Associate Professor of Politics
Beechey consciously brings in stories about her own experiences—not to impose her political views on her students but to model for them how to analyze the world around them and their place in it.
“I identify as a queer person and have built a family through queer reproduction,” she says, nodding to the kids waiting nearby for their mom to take them to play tennis. “I need to be visible to my students, and I do that by talking about myself, my partner and his experience as a trans person, and our process of navigating the world.”
Offering Footholds To Build a Better World
Beechey follows her students’ journeys and extends a standing invitation to stop by during office hours even if they aren’t enrolled in one of her courses.
“This is a place where you really get to know your students,” she says. “Whitman students passionately open up about issues they care about and willingly engage with and learn from one another.” With support from the college’s Louis B. Perry Faculty- Student Summer Research Award, Beechey has included students in the research for her second book, a deep dive into federal sex education policy from the Clinton administration to the present. Her 2024 summer research associate was a rising junior from Seattle, Helena Salathe ’26.
Ultimately, Beechey’s goal isn’t for all her students to pursue careers in public policy, though many have certainly done so. Rather, she wants them to be thoughtful global citizens; to gain a set of critical concepts and tools to make sense of their lives and the changing world—long after graduation.
“I’m offering them the footholds they need so they can leave here and begin to build a better world that they would like to live in both individually and collectively.”
New Conversations Ahead
This coming academic year, Beechey will take a partial step back from teaching to serve as the Chair of the Faculty.
“This is a time with many shifts in the institution of higher education,” Beechey says. “Important questions are being asked right now that will affect Whitman’s future. I’m eager to be a person that can amplify faculty voices,” she says.
How Susanne Beechey Got to the Blues
Susanne Beechey’s first job out of college wasn’t a good fit—and she knew it almost immediately.
Intent on helping to end systemic poverty in the United States, she joined a nonprofit in St. Paul, Minnesota, working with the local government to implement a new welfare reform policy. Without any work experience of her own, Beechey was tasked with helping unemployed mothers find jobs within a fractured and sometimes corrupt system.
“In school, I’d focused on studying theories about how race, class, gender, sexuality and age work together to influence people’s lives,” she says. “Suddenly, I was working in a place that was an active example of that intersectionality. I saw how the theories played out in real people’s lives.”
Beechey realized that instead of implementing programs at the grassroots level, she was better suited to make a difference by becoming a graduate student of public policy. “I wanted to learn how the welfare system worked to better utilize it for affecting change.”
As part of her doctoral program, Beechey taught undergraduates, discovering her true calling lay in the classroom. She was recruited by Whitman’s Politics Department more than 15 years ago and has never looked back. “My colleagues and students are why I’m still at Whitman and will be here another 15 years too.”