David Willbern, a graduate of Amherst College and University of California, Berkeley, came to State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973 as an Assistant Professor of English. He became an Associate Professor in the Department of English in 1979. In 1997, he was made full Professor and he continues to teach in the department of English. Willbern worked for many years in academic administration; acting as Associate Dean for Educational Technology for the College of Arts and Sciences from 1997 to 1998. Willbern also served as the Associate Vice Provost for Educational Technology from 1998 to 2002. He held the position of Associate Dean of Arts and Letters three times--from 1986 to 1989, again from 1992 to 1993 and from 1996 to 1997. In 1998, the Faculty of Arts and Letters joined with the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics to become College of Arts and Sciences.

As a professor, Willbern taught undergraduate courses in composition and literature, American and English Renaissance literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Shakespeare, literature and psychology, and bestsellers. Willbern instructed graduate seminars in similar topics, as well as Freud, the revenge play (Classical and Renaissance), theory of psychotherapy, history of literary criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.

The Faculty of Arts and Letters came into being in 1967 when the University planned a massive academic reorganization. The academic units were divided into seven different faculties, of which Arts and Letters was one. It originally consisted of a number of departments that were in the original College of Arts and Letters including Art, Classics, Drama and Speech, English, Modern Languages and Literatures, and Music. Other newly-formed departments were added to the faculty later like American Studies, African-American Studies, Comparative Literature, and the Center for Media Study. It was disbanded in 1998 when the University again reorganized and reestablished the College of Arts and Sciences.