A search for unsung heroes turns up council representatives like Reg Shaw, who dealt sternly with “prostitutes and pimps,” and rappers like Vince Staples, who has been featured in pop acts since he was sixteen. Why is rap singing or city council voting heroic? In contrast, imagine working for nearly forty years in an industry where you knew from the get-go that the odds were stacked against you climbing to the top of the chart because of your gender. If this is difficult, imagine climbing Mount Everest for forty years, and failing to reach the top every time. This has been the conundrum for all women in publishing since the first women were allowed in. The first American female publisher was Elizabeth Timothy, who worked with Benjamin Franklin to take over her husband’s newspaper, South Carolina Gazette, back in 1739. The Ivy League university press ceiling was broken three years ago, in 2014, by Jennifer Crewe, the Associate Provost and Director of Columbia University Press (CUP). I asked Crewe if this achievement has meant a statue in her honor: “I assume you are joking about the statue,” she replied. There is no Wikipedia page to salute her achievement.
“There isn’t much popular appreciation for the kind of books we do,” she added. No appreciation for the industry that vets the work of top professors in the country? Education is one of the top expenses and causes for life-long indebtedness in the US, and yet, the directors and editors who chaperone the people selling knowledge are working “in the background.”
Crewe’s particular achievement can be clarified with some additional statistics. The Ivy League consists of only a handful of universities with presses. The other university presses broke this record earlier. The first major corporation, Coca-Cola, saw a female director in 1934, Lettie Pate Whitehead (and she was primarily a philanthropist). According to a Publishers Weekly survey, “85% of publishing employees with less than three years of experience are women.” The survey also discovered that in this sector, in 2010, “women make on average $64,600 compared to men, $105,130”
A large number of these women survive the first years, and make up the majority of the publishing industry at all levels, with the exception of the top spots. These types of inequalities would probably discourage most women from joining the publishing industry, but the numbers are hidden beneath the cloak of “researchers” that claim that we live in a post-feminist society, where no sex-based discrimination exists, and women should be happy they can find a job, even if it pays 60 cents on the dollar. In this environment, it is inspiring to see that, finally, in 2014, a woman has managed to secure a directorship of an Ivy League press. So, let’s take a look at how she did it, so we can all learn how to follow her example.
Crewe’s upbringing explains the type of roots it takes to survive the publishing ascent: “My father was a physicist at the University of Chicago and my mother was a teacher before she had me. She was a school board member of every public school I attended after we moved to a suburban area, and she served on the State of Illinois School Board.”
From Texas
Unsung Heroine of Ivy League Publishing: Jennifer Crewe
by Anna Faktorovich, PhD
Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Wael Hallaq, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and the author of The Impossible State, which won the first prize at this event, Jennifer Crewe, and John Coatsworth, CU Provost