After finishing a BA at Sarah Lawrence College, she began an MFA at Columbia University. “I was lucky in that the University of Chicago provided a tuition benefit for children of faculty, so my tuition in college was covered. I received a scholarship from Columbia, but needed to earn money so I worked part-time at Columbia University Press while I was working on my MFA. I had refused to learn how to type while I was in high school because I didn’t want to end up as a secretary. But after college I realized it would be more efficient to type properly, and I knew that in order to get an entry-level job I would need that skill. My first job at Columbia was re-typing, very slowly, on an IBM Selectric, letters that my boss, the then-humanities editor, had typed at 100 wpm on a manual typewriter and then edited.”
Publishing had become a more sensible choice than poetry for a career: “I started out wanting to be a poet. I had some poems published, won the 92nd St. YM-YWHA Younger Poets award, and a publisher showed some interest in my manuscript. But I was not confident enough to ask more established poets to push my cause and help me publish the book. I needed a steady job and wanted to stay in New York, and I didn’t feel comfortable taking adjunct positions that were not secure. So eventually my publishing career took precedence over poetry.”
A year into her MFA, she became an Editorial Assistant at CUP, remaining there and gradually moving up the ranks to Manuscript Editor from 1978 through 1982. She wanted to move away from copyediting and into acquisitions work, so she moved to Charles Scribner’s Sons as editor, keeping that same job without advancement through 1986, when she returned to CUP, and remained there ever since. When asked about sex-based discrimination in publishing, Crewe explains: “Soon after I was hired at Macmillan in the mid-eighties I learned about a class action suit brought by female employees, and that my salary was $5000 less than that of male colleagues doing the same job. My salary was increased because of the efforts of women who came before me. Now that kind of blatant wage discrimination doesn’t happen often, but subtler forms of discrimination against women continue.” A look at publicly available academic salaries for men and women at most colleges still show at least an 8:10 ratio salary discrepancy, but it is motivating to know that fair wages are possible only if all women sue their employers. Scribners, now a division of Macmillan, saw its first female publisher in 1985, Mildred Marmur, just as the $5,000 discrimination lawsuit was wrapped up, and just before Crewe decided to leave Macmillan for CUP.
Crewe started in an acquisitions editor position back at CUP as Executive Editor (1986-90). She was later promoted to Senior Executive Editor (1990-94), then to Publisher for the Humanities, a managerial position (1994-99), then to Editorial Director (1999-2005), then to Associate Director and Editorial Director (2005-13), before becoming the Interim Director (2013-14), and then President and Director (2014-15), and finally Associate Provost and Director (2016-). This is an example of a very steady and determined climb. The length of this struggle begs the question how Crewe managed to keep from leaving CUP for a non-Ivy press, where she might have become a director decades earlier: “I was offered a directorship at a non-Ivy press just before I received the Columbia offer. I would certainly have left Columbia if I hadn’t received the offer to become its director.” I had worked hard, knew how I would lead the organization, and I would not have wanted to stay under another director.”
Women’s willingness to take lower salaries and to remain despite serious underpayment is both the reason there are so many women in publishing, and why they’re paid up to half less than men.
It is typical for universities to require some service to the field, but Crewe explains that “during the years I was frustrated about ever becoming director of the Press, I threw myself into the service work as an outlet.” She has participated in a number of major academic associations. Her most recent, crowning achievement was an election, in June of this year, to the President-elect position of the Association of American University Presses. Her presidency will begin in June 2018 and will run for a year. She has also served on the Executive Council of the Association of American Publishers Professional Scholarly Publishers division, the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council, and various smaller committee roles earlier in her career. She received several awards, such as the AAUP 2006 Constituency Award, and, most recently, she was named to the rank of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. She has also given talks on scholarly publishing at the MLA, Association for Asian Studies, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, AAUP, PSP, and at international conferences. She has published essays on cinema, Asian studies, scholarly publishing, and dissertation revision.
She continued her formal education in 2003, with the University of Chicago’s Graham School “Economics of Small Press Publishing” course. Christie Henry was working for the University of Chicago Press at this point, but they met later on the German Book Office Scholarly Editors’ Trip to Berlin and Munich, in 2010. Then in 2013, Crewe took the Yale University “Leadership Strategies in Book Publishing” course.
To confirm the answers that Crewe gave in this interview, I also contacted the second woman to become an Ivy League press director, Christie Henry, who has just been appointed to serve Princeton University Press. Henry took the same Yale Publishing course as Crewe, two years later in 2015. This was not a coincidence: “Jennifer had recommended it to me, and I know well to take Jennifer’s advice—she is an incredibly inspiring publisher.”