The Rise of the Neoliberal University

Despite the general fuzziness of social media usage around the term “neoliberalism,” neoliberal policy is relatively straightforward: the protection of markets and privatization of public services, which allows consumers to choose and markets to decide. Such “freedom” to engage in commerce should be protected as a tenet of democracy, neoliberals argue, hence legislation is often aimed at protecting free markets and stripping social-welfare programs. Examples of such policy making include deregulating financial institutions, bailing out the banking sector in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, redistributing wealth (upward), and instituting massive tax breaks for corporations (Abramovitz; Krugman). Trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, proposed under the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively, ensure market freedom for corporations at the expense of workers around the world (Roman and Arregui). This has taken place while wages remain stagnant and wealth disparities increase (Horowitz, Igielnik, and Kochhar).

The seeds of neoliberal thought were planted by the Mont Pelerin Society, which began convening in Switzerland in 1947 (Harvey, 20). Members included economist Milton Friedman, political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, economist Ludvig von Mises, among others, who advocated a return to nineteenth-century liberal notions of personal freedom and market autonomy, which they believed would correct society’s worst impulses for greed and corruption. Milton Friedman describes such economic policies as a “new faith”:

Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth century liberal emphasis in the fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the goal of the competitive order. . . . The state would police the system, establish conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress. (Friedman, “Neo-Liberalism,” 7)

Drawing on a utopian vision of a world free of hunger and want through market competition, Friedman and his fellow neoliberals advocated for free markets, privatization, and minimal government interference except to protect private enterprise.7

Tenets of this new liberalism include the belief that nurturing this economic vision remains an inherently political project. Contending that governmental interference impedes freedom, neoliberals only insist on state intervention in the market to protect free enterprise itself. Friedman argues that capitalism is essential for a functioning democracy: “There is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom” (Capitalism and Freedom, 8). Only unfettered capitalism democratically brings about freedom from want, prejudice, and oppression because competitive exchange enables “co-ordination without coercion” (13). For Friedman, freedom and politics are inextricably linked because capitalism allows economic power to offset political power: “Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power” (9). Paradoxically, neoliberal capitalism, it is argued, both limits political power by eliminating state social programs and enables political freedom through cooperative exchange at one and the same time.

The political valence of neoliberalism has become especially problematic as time has passed. Friedman’s ideas were implemented by governments around the world during the 1970s and 1980s in response to financial crises, and he became an adviser to Ronald Reagan, who spearheaded massive economic shifts leading to obscene wealth and income inequality. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher applied Friedman’s beliefs, stripping social programs of government support. Implementing a philosophy that individuals are more important than collectives allowed Reagan and Thatcher to eradicate social programs under the auspices of individual responsibility. “They are casting their problems at society,” Thatcher famously claimed. “And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first” (“Margaret Thatcher: A Life in Quotes”). Mirroring Friedman’s claims that society is simply an aggregate of individuals responsible unto themselves, Thatcher and Reagan vigorously implemented the political project of neoliberalism as a move toward individualism and privatization and away from social support and collectivism.8 Such shifts have had a cataclysmic effect on all aspects of governmental social support, including for higher education.

Neoliberalism has transformed education in myriad negative ways, from increasing tuition to decreasing job prospects for graduate students, from decimating humanities enrollments (with subsequent weaponization of low enrollment numbers to shrink or eliminate less lucrative areas of study) to adjunctification of the professoriate. It is now common to find humanities departments that have not hired new tenure-track faculty in decades, while major areas of study are no longer even offered. Such realities are omnipresent, with tangible effects on faculty, staff, librarians, students, and communities. As funding continues to shrivel up and university administrations persist in seeking financial support through corporate relationships and wealthy donors, many institutions nurture disciplines and majors that seem most directly related to the workforce—and, as a consequence, rely heavily on adjunct labor and graduate students to teach humanities courses while reducing tenure-track faculty lines. Many administrators seek to make up the loss of public funds by raising tuition, precipitating an unfathomable and obscene debt crisis among college graduates who may find little opportunity for the high-paying employment necessary to pay off loans.

The rise of the neoliberal university has, in turn, profoundly transformed the mission of public education. As universities turn to private sources of funding, mirroring financial frameworks of private enterprise to remain solvent, education becomes a peddler of what Henry Heller calls “academic capitalism.” In his account, academic capitalism is the predominant mode of higher education, marked by “the variety of ways in which markets, states, and higher education are increasingly inter-related and the implications of the blurring of the lines between these spheres” (Heller, 173). Capital flows along circuits to entities in ways that typically do not support humanities programs but build STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) complexes with industry funds or football facilities with private or corporate donations. Universities invest in niche projects supported by private funds rather than in the larger educational mission (Hunt).

Neoliberal policies in the United Kingdom have led to an obsession with excellence as a metric. Focusing on impact assessment and performance targets challenges educators to reconceptualize scholarship to meet benchmarks rather than increase human knowledge (Olssen). The Teaching and Research Excellence Frameworks (TEF and REF) pressure humanities faculty to teach and publish, according to metrics, and secure large grants, which are rare in the humanities. John O’Regan and John Gray describe these mechanisms as “neoliberal instruments of accountability”: “There seems no doubt that in respect of the current situation in the UK and elsewhere, it is essential to the neoliberal ‘multiverse’ that the imaginary which underlies the REF and the UK government’s attitude to higher education is sustained” (545). Such an “imaginary” has replaced notions of education as a public good with notions of education as a customer service.

Neoliberalism has altered the role of the educator, too. Increased tuition necessitates higher debt, which is administrated by the government with exorbitant compounding interest. Because students are going into insurmountable debt, the entire purpose of education has been transformed. Christopher Newfield characterizes this as “the great mistake,” whereby the function of the university has irrevocably shifted because of eroding governmental financial investment: “We know that no country has a large middle class without mass-scale higher learning, and that this in turn depends on minimizing individual cost. . . . And yet most people aren’t fighting to hang onto low-cost public colleges and their power to democratize intelligence” (italics in original, 16). Rather than seeing public education as a social good funded by the state to produce an educated citizenry, neoliberalism has established an exchange model where burdens for college expense are borne by individuals, many of whom will never escape their debts. “When a relationship-based system is converted to a market,” Newfield contends, “resources move toward those willing and able to pay for them” (29). Because students pay exorbitant amounts, they gravitate toward the few majors they perceive will pay off with lucrative careers, despite evidence that humanities graduates actually do quite well comparatively (Moran; Carlson). Unfortunately, as more students major in computer science or engineering, they will produce skill gluts where an excess of technical experts decreases wages in those disciplines, and it is hard not to see Silicon Valley coding programs as anything but a cynical effort to reduce future salaries.9

What’s So Neoliberal about Digital Humanities?

Because DH crystallized in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008, it has always been imbricated in austerity discourse. In order to position itself within a skeptical humanities and generate administrative support, early digital humanists relied on the rhetoric of innovation and disruption, of finding great jobs for students, building labs, and securing grants when funds were scarce. While the humanities have always engaged in revolutionary discourse about new theories and methods—one thinks of the much-ballyhooed “Theory Wars”—DH’s revolutionary discourse was unfortunately paired with economic constriction and often mirrored the rhetoric of Silicon Valley. In 2010, for example, Mark Sample characterized DH with language similar to journalistic narratives about the tech industries: “The digital humanities should not be about the digital at all. It’s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities” (quoted in Svensson, par. 40). It is hard not to hear echoes of Silicon Valley in such a positioning of DH, especially when tech leaders were being touted in the media as “disrupters” at the same time (O’Brien). Furthermore, mainstream reporting often sensationalizes a few methods or practitioners who fit more comfortably within tech’s investments in big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.10 While such disruptions have been crucial in helping us reimagine academia, and journalistic coverage can be salutary for building the discipline, critics see these events as evidence of Big Tech’s encroachment into the humanities.

In perhaps the most controversial critique of DH as fundamentally and irrevocably neoliberal, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia attacked the field in a 2016 piece touted as a “political history of the digital humanities.” While many have criticized this piece, I do not believe we have fully grappled with its central claim or taken seriously the critique. Of course, there are fundamental issues with the article’s portrayal and reasoning, but, as I have argued thus far, we must accept its basic claim about DH and the neoliberal university as a starting point for a new political economy of the field. For Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, DH is a neoliberal symptom because it “sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress.” DH’s focus on infusing the humanities with an ethos of building, coding, and modeling, rather than critical theory, they argue, smacks of an instrumental, rationalistic technocentrism marching in lockstep with neoliberal profit models rather than espousing political agendas of solidarity. In their view, critical theory is an emancipatory project nurtured by the humanities proper, which DH purposely undermines.11

Rather than live up to its putatively insurgent character, they claim, DH has displaced “politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.” The humanities resist neoliberal takeover of the university because they practice critique and political activism, which undermine cynical efforts to financialize academia, while DH promotes a postcritical project that exists comfortably within university power structures:

We therefore suggest that it is not the “traditional” scholarly world, with its hierarchies and glorified experts and close reading of works read by only a precious few people, to which the Digital Humanities social movement is most meaningfully opposed. What it stands in opposition to, rather, is the insistence that academic work should be critical, and that there is, after all, no work and no way to be in the world that is not political. (Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia)

Like other forms of postcritical activity, DH is envisioned to be a sphere of academic endeavor that actively eschews political engagement. Here, we see the Manichean rhetoric reappear but now the binary of traditional/digital is mapped onto dichotomies of political/apolitical and critical/uncritical as though only binaristic operations are possible within academia.

Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia focus on DH operating within a corporatist system of reward and results. Rather than resist such reconfigurations of academic work, they argue, DH plays a key role in preparing the humanities for assimilation into them: “By providing a model for humanities teaching and research that appears to overcome these perceived limitations, Digital Humanities has played a leading role in the corporatist restructuring of the humanities.” A roundtable on “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” at 2013’s Modern Language Association convention deploys the same rhetoric: “At the same time that the market logic of neoliberalism has been used to decimate the mainstream humanities from within and without, this same logic has encouraged foundations, corporations, and university administrations to devote new resources to the digital humanities” (Chun et al., 499). DH is painted as the advanced guard for financialization, austerity, and commodification. In this vision, DH will lead the humanities into compliance with neoliberal initiatives and accomplish this coup de grâce through grant funding to build rather than theorize.

Of course, such characterizations ignore the realities of capitalism, imagining a literary narrative of heroes and villains rather than the more mundane actualities of budget cuts, austerity, and privatization. This simplistic narrative envisions a revolutionary humanities valiantly resisting capitalism through individual political activism, an idealized version of the humanities that has never existed. Neoliberal economic policies do not require a vanguard to prepare the humanities for replacement, like the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Such a description ignores the ways in which digital humanists are subject to the same pressures and tensions as anyone else in the twenty-first-century university, beset by unreliable resources, excessive workloads, and precarity. And yet, it is difficult not to see how DH has been able to maneuver in a time of austerity precisely because it is salable to administrators, providing students with both employable skills and a liberal-arts education.12 As impacts of Covid-19 accelerate existing austerity, such tensions will become ever more fraught and the impacts of neoliberal governance will only spread.

Digital Humanities and the Theoretical Turn

Conceptions of DH as a postcritical activity that denigrates humanistic theory-as-politics does seem visible in some early characterizations of the field (Scheinfeldt). However, many DH scholars have called for combinations of praxis and theory, conceived as broadly emancipatory applications of philosophy and cultural theory.13 Nearly ten years on, positing a postcritical-theory DH, which eschews theoretical reflexivity and critique regarding race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, colonialism, or identity, seems quaint. With the rise of openly white-supremacist far-right political parties, erosions of human rights surrounding immigration and migration, reckonings over racism in response to police brutality and state-sanctioned murder, sexual and gender inequalities, wealth and income disparity, governmental failure in response to Covid-19, and imminent climate collapse, critical theories articulating sociopolitical issues are more crucial than ever. Whereas Frances Fukuyama declared an “end to history” in 1992, predicting the hegemony of neoliberal democracy, we are witnessing a resurgence of history and a renewed need for a critical theory that will help us map our political positionality vis-à-vis such challenges. Slavoj Žižek captures this moment well in reversing Marx’s formula that philosophers had only ever interpreted the world while the point was to change it: “Now is the time to think.”

DH has seen an explosion of theorizing around political questions of identity, representation, and positionality. Scholarly communities have formed around political stasis points, crystallizing into vibrant communities expanding boundaries both for new projects and for newcomers. Jamie Bianco advances a DH “which is not one,” calling for a return to critical theory. Similarly, Roopika Risam calls for an “intersectional” DH, in which the “relationship between theory and praxis is integral.” (“Beyond the Margins,” par. 4). New communities have arisen around different nodes of power and identity. Twitter hashtags such as #blackdh, #transformdh, #femdh, and #queerdh centralize conversations about representation, and new books have done much to engage postcolonial theory, critical race theory, gender studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental studies.14 Scholars have issued various calls for the discipline to expand, adapt, and evolve. Indeed, the theme of 2016’s Debates in the Digital Humanities was “the expanded field” (Klein and Gold).

As an expanded field, DH incorporates critical theories both to expand representation within the field and ground research projects in critical theories of identity and power. The chapters in Debates in Digital Humanities 2023 demonstrate forcefully the continued excellence of scholarly work applying critical theories of positionality around questions of race (chapters 9, 12, and 15), gender (chapter 8), ability and embodiment (chapters 8 and 21), sexuality (chapter 7), language (chapters 3 and 19), and indigeneity (chapter 8). Furthermore, scholars apply critical methods to questions of oppression and inequality in computation and data, representing new humanistic considerations of tech.15 DH has been at the forefront of recent political engagement in the public sphere, too. Political responses are visible in projects such as Torn Apart/Separados, which responded to state-sponsored abduction of immigrant children at the U.S.–Mexico border; the Visionary Futures Collective around academic responses to the pandemic; the COVID Black taskforce’s analysis of the pandemic as it affects the Black community; or the “rapid response” project known as Nimble Tents. DH is uniquely poised to produce important scholarly projects that respond to current events directly. There is so much critical work happening in this field, but where are the theoretical discussions of class, economics, hegemony, ideology, and capitalism? If we are doing so much to integrate cultural theory into DH, why have we largely ignored the work of Marxist thinkers who have theorized and critiqued capitalism in ways that could help us respond to our detractors and spur the field to consider economic questions? Why is there not yet a Marxist digital humanities working to foreground economic issues in concert with critical interventions along intersectional axes of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and sovereignty? This absence is all the more surprising given the disproportional impact of Covid on these communities, both within the university and without (Shapiro; Cahn).

What Is to Be Done? Toward a Marxist Digital Humanities

Field-level theoretical advances have focused more on critical theories of identity while neglecting Marxist theories of class, exploitation, ideology, and capitalism. Yet questions about our disciplinary role under late capitalism must be developed, too.16 This absence is striking given that even Stanley Fish, that perennial bad-faith critic of DH, articulates its politics as “a left agenda” (“The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality”). As Fish notes, DH has always been invested in commons, but we still need a stronger theoretical analysis organized under the umbrella of an anti-neoliberal digital humanities, grounded in Marxist theories of economics, class, hegemony, and ideology. The need for this Marxist DH will become even more necessary as university communities experience tectonic shifts because of the pandemic, which will surely lead to more austerity and disinvestment (Wang; Kelsky; Kramnick).

Alongside critiques of identity and representation, DH should foreground political economy in an effort to encourage a more economically just academy. This is especially important if we take seriously the notion that DH is more comfortable under administrative neoliberalism. Rather than dismiss those claims, despite the fact that we may believe they are overblown, we can practice a form of immanent critique, maneuvering in solidarity from within neoliberalism. Max Horkheimer described the goals of Critical Theory as a form of immanence: “Every part of the theory presupposes the critique of the existing order and the struggle against it along lines determined by the theory itself” (229). Similarly, DH is positioned to confront, analyze, and mitigate austerity and oppression along lines determined by digital humanists as we navigate the post-pandemic education landscape. As universities and colleges experience increasing austerity after Covid-19, we must theorize models for a DH that is concerned as a discipline with economic precarity, academic labor, and austerity.

As higher education undergoes constrictions, solidarity will become ever more necessary for survival. An anti-neoliberal DH must advance class consciousness across the community. If critics such as Richard Grusin are correct that DH “reproduces structurally” precarious labor “that has marked late twentieth and twenty-first-century global capitalism” (87), DH can respond through a class-based approach that encourages solidarity across all academic ranks and sectors. But class is not a concept that has ever mapped well onto academia. Marx theorized the role of labor and class antagonism under industrial capitalism long ago, arguing that the transformation of money into capital requires a form of exchange whereby the worker sells labor power. Labor power is thus both an inherent quality of the worker and a commodity that can be sold on the market. However, Marx’s concept of a working class that provides surplus labor to enrich the bourgeoisie does not correspond well to academic labor in DH. Despite precarity and austerity, digital humanists cannot conceive of labor in the same way other workers do. We are not construction workers, cab drivers, or warehouse employees, so our model for labor may be different. Building solidarity requires new theories of production and class.

Class is a structural relation that corresponds to labor within the unique means of production in which we labor, and we need theories that reflect that reality and help us build solidarity. In her recent attempt to move critical theory beyond the assumption that “capitalism” describes our current economic conditions, McKenzie Wark articulates a model of class that captures the unique class position of digital humanists. Extending Marxist theories of class relation, Wark argues that we should no longer rely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of labor and class because such descriptions do not account for our information economy, which has become the predominant mode of production and ownership in the twenty-first century. Instead, Wark argues, the twenty-first-century ruling class, which she calls the vectoral class, owns and controls vectors of information (Capital Is Dead, 13). This emerging ruling class represents a new model of class relation uniquely suited to the fluidity and mass of information: “The regulatory regime emerging in the last quarter century favors the mobility of information, and not just finance, as a means of coordinating economic activity transnationally” (93). The shift to a mode of production focused on information work brings with it new class antagonisms, as notions of property and production evolve.

Central to this project is identification of an emerging form of class antagonism. For Wark, as for Marx, class is not categorical but a form of relation to a ruling class: “First, class means class antagonism. It’s not a category, it’s a relation” (Capital Is Dead, 98). This newly emerging subaltern class, which Wark theorized as far back as 2004, is the hacker class, comprised of information workers whose labor is unusual perhaps but still serves a ruling class:

The hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property. This legal hack makes of the hack a property producing process, and thus a class producing process. The hack produces the class force capable of asking—and answering—the property question, the hacker class. The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relation, with unforeseen properties, which question the property form itself. (A Hacker Manifesto, par. 036)

The hacker class does not own the information it produces but rather performs the task of creating content, coding, managing databases, analyzing data, and other tasks, which crystallize the notion of information as property. Producing such property has the unintended effect of producing new class antagonisms between hackers and vectoralists and may provide a challenge to the information economy itself, to the new capitalist order led by massive technical conglomerates who own massive amounts of information.17

Of course, the notion of a hacker class should not obscure existing schisms either within DH or the broader sector of information workers, nor should we fall prey to idealizing “hackers.” Labor in the information sector is variegated and divided along many internal axes of oppression, especially as tech companies have become massive vectoral monopolies owning information technologies and personal data. As Lilly Irani points out, tech-sector workers experience varying levels of support, remuneration, and oppression, posing the question: “What is at stake in hiding the delivery people, stockroom workers, content moderators, and call center operators laboring to produce the automated experience?” Such “ghost labor” represents a growing underclass of information workers who exist in precarious and exploitative positions within the “gig” economy (Gray and Suri). In a similar way, digital humanists occupy a range of labor positions, some with more security or remuneration than others. The concept of the hacker class must not collapse these different experiences in an effort to build solidarity. Recognition of inequality must be our first duty in advancing a political economy of DH. Instead, the notion of a hacker class provides a theoretical starting point to coordinate with solidarity rather than simply collaborate.

The hacker class does represent one way to organize digital humanists against austere economic policies ravaging higher education and complements existing efforts by organized labor to establish unions. As conditions have deteriorated in both academia and the tech sector, information workers have organized labor unions, including a remarkable attempt by Google employees to form their first union (Koul and Shaw). But many digital humanists are not yet organized in any official way, and the hacker concept could help conceptually organize such individuals as workers engaged in class struggle and connect institutions with labor unions to those without. Such an approach builds well on existing efforts to critique questions of academic labor and financial precarity by scholars such as Julia Flanders, Spencer Keralis, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Lisa Marie Rhody, Christina Boyles, Anne Cong-Huyen, Carrie Johnston, Jim McGrath, Amanda Phillips, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Kathi Inman Berens, and others. Their critical work in identifying and analyzing labor inequalities in DH are central for understanding particular labor issues. But we still need to contextualize those dynamics within a broader theoretical frame and history of labor organizing. Reconfiguring DH around a class relation allows us to advance organized modes of solidarity across the academy. After all, such forms of solidarity are already baked into DH because it is so heterogeneous and wide-ranging. Our scholarly organizations represent students, postdocs, faculty, librarians, and staff at universities, colleges, cultural organizations, historical societies, libraries, and more. DH cuts across disciplines too, connecting us to information workers across the academy.

Whereas many digital humanists are organized officially into labor unions, many do not have such opportunities to organize yet. Organizing all digital humanists as a class will provide a space for solidarity and coordination. Such efforts begin in our professional organizations, and we should petition position statements on topics related to economic precarity, labor, and ideology. Our professional organizations represent the incredible diversity of DH labor and must begin to organize activities and outputs around these issues. Solidarity efforts must develop intersectional networks to combat austerity and financialization alongside other efforts around inequality and oppression.18 Currently, individual scholars, often in non-tenure-track positions, develop resources with little professional support, but the field as a whole should be at the forefront of such efforts through professional development opportunities, grants, conferences, and resources (Alpert-Abrams; Alpert-Abrams et al.). Furthermore, DH organizations should coordinate with labor unions to imagine new modes of solidarity and support, especially for our most vulnerable colleagues, and this would establish an organizing pipeline between labor unions and unrepresented workers and nonunion institutions. Graduate students, undergraduates, staff, librarians, instructors, and lecturers around the country are engaged in labor actions with little public commentary or support from DH professional organizations to which they belong.19

As we imagine modes of class solidarity against austerity, we must also foreground academic hiring, especially in the wake of Covid-19. One benefit to advancing a hacker class is that it can, and indeed must, include administrators, such as directors of centers, who are often not included in official union negotiations. Together, we must confront the looming labor crisis in the humanities and DH. Digital humanists should vigorously counter the ideology that DH will lead to academic employment and begin actively engaging and critiquing the job-market process in solidarity with the humanities. How many DH courses include focused discussion of the job market for digital scholarship? If we are advocating DH as a path to employment outside the tenure track, then we must be prepared to provide job-market training and resources too, including focused training in how to search for those jobs and leverage technical skills in ways that mitigate the class oppression of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs. Rather than simply espousing “alt-ac” employment as a solution to neoliberal markets, we should be interrogating the notion of an academy training students for disappearing jobs and seek to advance a more equitable academy while we help students avoid being crushed by it. Above all, we must think of ourselves as labor under capitalism and organize appropriately to meet the threats to that labor as a whole.

A Marxist DH should also address how capital circulates across the university. DH is often more successful at securing grants and fellowships because it promises results that mesh with the neoliberal university’s metrics for success. Much of the resentment and suspicion toward DH as a neoliberal activity revolves around grant funding. Adam Kirsch describes this as the “quantification” inherent to neoliberal university bureaucracy, which cannot measure “changed minds and expanded spirits” but can measure citations and grants. Writing in The New Republic about the limits of the digital humanities, Kirsch concludes, “All those grants have to be accounted for somehow; the rhetoric of the digital, in the academy as in the marketplace, prides itself on being results-oriented.” Of course, Kirsch seems to forget that publication outputs are also quantified—what is tenure, after all?—but the focus on grants is a common critique. If DH is capable of securing funds from grants, so the argument goes, administrations will be more likely to support DH, and with a limited pool of resources, the humanities will experience even more austerity.

To combat significant cuts to traditional humanities projects, I propose we think about ways to redistribute grant funds so that some funding goes to non-DH areas. This demands conscious effort to reframe grant proposals so that they advance the humanist mission as much as launch new initiatives, tools, or projects. And because so much of the money from federal grants is already redistributed through indirect costs, we should advocate for more transparency about these allotments and push for humanities support from humanities grants. Some changes are already in the wind. The NEH changed the requirements for the 2021 Digital Humanities Advancement Grants to include “how the project will support and benefit all project staff, such as through project-based learning, mentoring, or immersion in the activities of the institution for undergraduate or graduate students” (Brennan). Furthermore, changes to project priorities open space for scholarship that “examines the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society,” suggesting wonderful new confluences between the digital humanities and the humanities.

Attention to funding distribution could also provide support for graduate students or faculty to participate or may provide avenues for collaboration between the digital project and non-DH faculty, staff, librarians, and students. Despite claims from humanists such as Brouillette that granting agencies only put money into DH projects that offer “equipment” and “student training,” we can see that such projects actually offer collaborative models for advancing humanities scholarship. While Brouillette specifically targets the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), I collaborate on a SSHRC-funded project called the Modernist Archives Publishing Project that is rigorously dedicated to the humanistic project of digitizing archival materials related to twentieth-century publishing and that enacts a feminist approach to collaboration (Battershill et al.). While it is true that grant funds pay for some technical development, the funds also support students who gain crucial project management skills and archival experience.

Another DH Is Possible

Certainly, no academic program will undo or prevent the damage being done to educational institutions under late capitalism. As Fredric Jameson so clearly realized, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (xii). Academic institutions are anachronistic, trying to preserve a medieval conception of knowledge production within a brutally modern economic reality. The humanities will not resist neoliberalism just as the digital humanities will be unlikely to exacerbate neoliberalism; instead, we should reposition political economy at the center of our academic praxis as digital humanists, advancing a principled DH that takes neoliberalism’s effects seriously and organizes to allay the effects. Rather than simply dismiss interlocutors who accuse us of neoliberalism, we should instead advance a politically organized DH that leads the way in developing a set of ethics and tactics for mitigating the worst effects of austerity and capitalism, a Marxist digital humanities that will advance a commitment to the academic commons, to class awareness, to an academic environment that supports precarious labor, and to a financial redistribution of resources.

Such an orientation builds well on the work we already do to support open-access initiatives, critique platforms, share resources and code, redesign tenure-and-promotion processes, envision new models of graduate and undergraduate education and labor, and promote “the commons.” More than any other humanities discipline, DH has tackled such challenges, practicing what Kathleen Fitzpatrick has described as “generous thinking.” Much of the important work advancing a possible new model for higher education is happening in DH. But such efforts still seem scattered around the community, happening in individual pockets. DH has largely remained silent on such issues as a discipline, in part because we have not yet grappled with our field as part of the academic–industrial complex. It is time for us to tackle these challenges together.

Neoliberalism has proven to be a devastating failure, eroding public goods such as higher education. While the rich have gotten richer, the poor have grown poorer, with shrinking prospects for a sustainable and healthy future. But neoliberal capitalism is not the “end of history,” and we may soon approach the end of neoliberalism’s hegemony. Ganesh Sitaraman has described the imminent “collapse of neoliberalism” as the outcome of decades of failed economic policies comes to a head. As we confront intractable questions about “the commons” such as climate, pandemic response, intellectual property, and data, neoliberalism (and indeed capitalism itself) will be unable to respond. Wolfgang Streeck argues we may have entered a period of indeterminacy, “a period in which unexpected things can happen any time,” including the collapse of capitalism (12). Given Covid-19’s radical acceleration of processes that would have happened over the next few decades, we are potentially on the verge of an entirely new social, cultural, and academic reality, and we cannot wait to organize a more equitable university for everyone.

Although it remains unclear what comes next, now is the time to advance a compelling counternarrative to that of the neoliberal economists and politicians who have done little to ameliorate inequality and suffering, and digital humanists are well situated to craft such a narrative within the academy and beyond. Although we have not yet grappled with neoliberalism, we are uniquely poised to advance more humane models of higher education through a DH that leverages critiques against us as a point from which to engage. To quote Arundhati Roy, in her fiercely anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal work War Talk, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. . . . On a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing” (75). I hope this chapter serves as a starting point toward imagining another digital humanities well on its way, poised to confront the challenges facing us all.

Notes

1. NEH digital initiatives received a combined $35,967,499. Compare that figure with some “traditional” humanities grants awarded during the same period: State Humanities Councils General Operating Support Grants ($435,239,182), Humanities Collections and Reference ($74,447,577), Scholarly Editions and Translations ($51,640,946), America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations Implementation Grants ($37,879,744) (“NEH Grant Data, 2010–2019”).

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2. Henry Heller articulates forcefully how the humanities/social sciences worked in lockstep with the state during the Cold War: “Indeed, top academics more often than not had close ties to the US government. It furthermore shows how the content of the academic disciplines was harnessed to defending capitalism, liberalism, and American imperialism while attacking left-wing ideas” (10). One example of such coordination was the funding of the Paris Review by the CIA (Jones).

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3. Several universities have begun eliminating humanities departments. The New School (a bastion for progressive thought) is enacting massive cuts, which exemplify the impact of Covid on liberal arts. (“Update on the Impact of Covid-19”). Both University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and Adrian College reversed such plans as of this writing, but Covid-19 will surely exacerbate future efforts (Kremer; Marowski; Myers).

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4. This was visible in the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, who did much to destigmatize socialism in the United States.

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5. In many ways, DH is better poised as a discipline to mitigate neoliberalism because scholars are already doing much to advance open-access initiatives, digital commons, and more equitable academic work.

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6. There is a rich scholarly tradition in intersectional applications of Marxism, visible in work by Cedric J. Robinson, Adolph Reed, C. L. R. James, Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Sheila Rowbotham, Zillah Eisenstein, Dorothy Thompson, Christine Di Stefano, Heidi Hartmann, and Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson, among many others. A forthcoming collection showcases the continued energy around this topic (Lye and Nealon), and the 2022 Institute on Culture and Society conference for the Marxist Literary Group, like many DH conferences, requests intersectional papers on racial capitalism, queer Marxisms, materialist feminisms, and Marxist ecology (Marxist Literary Group).

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7. David Harvey argues that Friedman’s project is itself utopian: “We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (Harvey, 19). Intriguingly, the Left is typically accused of utopian thinking while the neoliberal faith in unfettered markets producing individual freedom seems equally utopian.

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8. Years earlier, in 1955, Friedman said something very similar to Thatcher: “Society is a collection of individuals and the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts” (“Liberalism, Old Style,” 11).

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9. Google now offers a “Grow with Google” program for information technology (IT) certifications, which will likely increase the IT workforce and lower wages.

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10. The New York Times ran a 2013 piece on literary history as seen through the lens of big data, which clearly positioned DH as a “tech trend” (Lohr). For a more recent example, see “How Data Analysis Can Enrich the Liberal Arts.”

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11. I differentiate between “critical theory” as the broader set of emancipatory philosophical interventions in the humanities and Critical Theory as the particular project of Western Marxism. I argue DH has developed the former and ignored the latter (“Critical Theory”).

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12. Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia claim that “the Digital Humanities social movement seeks to prove that a humanities education is beneficial to job seekers by reinventing that education as a course of training in the advanced use of information technology.” Too often, we pitch DH to administrators using language that administrators appreciate.

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13. See the writings of Cecire; Schmidt; Drucker; Liu; and Hunter.

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14. Notable books include Losh and Wernimont, Bodies of Information; Risam, New Digital Worlds; and Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, The Digital Black Atlantic. Additional articles and chapters of interest are Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities”; Barnett et al., “QueerOS”; Noble, “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities”; and Mandell, “Gender and Cultural Analytics.”

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15. See D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; Eubanks, Digital Dead End; Eubanks, Automating Inequality; and Benjamin, Race after Technology.

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16. The ideology of neoliberalism is not inherently antithetical to liberal notions of social progress, so identity questions can be advanced by the state while the economic oppression of capitalism is ignored. See Duggan.

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17. I am intrigued by the hacker as a destabilizing agent in DH and digital scholarship. One of the only scholars to recognize this, Claire Potter, argues that we need to incorporate a hacker ethos into existing humanistic projects.

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18. A striking example of the lacunae around economic issues is visible in the Black Lives Matter statement by Digital Humanities Quarterly, promising to publish “at least one special issue . . . every two years on a topic explicitly related to race and its relationship to additional axes of oppression, including gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, and language” (“DHQ Statement on Black Lives Matter and Structural Racism”). Economic precarity is not mentioned as one of the additional axes of oppression, which is especially striking given that the economic fallout from Covid-19 affects people of color more severely (Aratani and Rushe).

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19. Graduate students across the United States have been forming unions or going on strike at unprecedented levels with no commentary or support from DH organizations.

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