Colleges Are Abandoning the Classics — Down 70% Since 2008

Send us Fan MailThe data below are in the format indicated in the first line: The first word given is the term that I searched on opensyllabus.org, followed by its frequency in 2008, its frequency in 2024, and the percent change. So, for example, the first term in the list, that of the name of Diderot, declined by 90 percent in 16 years. Term  2008 frequency 2024 frequency percent changeDiderot 0.027714 0.0025916 -90.64876957Thucydides 0.10137 0.011824 -88.33579955Petrarch 0.060532 0.0074508 -87.69113857Aristophanes 0.090434 0.0115 -87.2835438Tacitus 0.039382 0.0053452 -86.42730181Boccaccio 0.040112 0.0055071 -86.27069206Erasmus 0.026255 0.0037254 -85.81070272Francis Bacon 0.033548 0.0051832 -84.54989865Virgil 0.061991 0.010042 -83.80087432Victor Hugo 0.009481 0.0016197 -82.91635903Xenophon 0.035736 0.006317 -82.32314753Montesquieu 0.040841 0.0076128 -81.35990794Dostoevsky 0.060532 0.011338 -81.26941122Voltaire 0.080953 0.015388 -80.99143948John Dryden 0.012041 0.0023654 -80.3554522Horace 0.078036 0.015388 -80.280896Hesiod 0.040112 0.0084227 -79.00204428Thomas Hobbes 0.080953 0.017331 -78.59128136Aeschylus 0.058344 0.012634 -78.34567393Tolstoy 0.080953 0.018303 -77.39058466Homer 0.18451 0.042923 -76.73676224Seneca 0.081682 0.019923 -75.60906932Dante 0.11231 0.028669 -74.47333274Moliere 0.043758 0.011338 -74.08930938Euripedes 0.081682 0.021381 -73.82409833Samuel Johnson 0.032089 0.0084227 -73.75206457Goethe 0.030631 0.0082607 -73.03156933Ovid 0.061991 0.017169 -72.30404414Sophocles 0.14149 0.041303 -70.80853771Edmund Burke 0.034277 0.010366 -69.75814686Friedrich Nietzsche 0.18816 0.057339 -69.52646684John Locke 0.074593 0.022806 -69.42608556Edmund Spenser 0.010279 0.0031979 -68.88899698Chaucer 0.11742 0.037092 -68.41083291David Hume 0.057615 0.018303 -68.23223119Cicero 0.064179 0.020409 -68.19987846Cervantes 0.053239 0.017007 -68.05537294Christopher Marlowe 0.014684 0.0050494 -65.61291201Herodotus 0.043029 0.014902 -65.36754282John Milton 0.044488 0.01555 -65.04675418Charles Dickens 0.032089 0.011662 -63.65732806Kant 0.30631 0.11176 -63.51408704Jonathan Swift 0.048134 0.018465 -61.63834296Plato 0.46019 0.17671 -61.60064321Shakespeare 0.48863 0.19226 -60.65325502Marcus Aurelius 0.013127 0.0055071 -58.04753561Aristotle 0.39966 0.17655 -55.82495121Schiller 0.098456 0.046163 -53.11306573Descartes 0.199983 0.096699 -51.64638994John Donne 0.026431 0.012876 -51.28447656John Keats 0.037195 0.018465 -50.35623068Mary Shelley 0.039382 0.019761 -49.82225382Epictetus 0.024067 0.017817 -25.9691694Edgar Allan Poe 0.02555 0.028276 10.66927593Average decline: -69.83809964The cover art for this episode is Imaginary View of the Grand Galarie in the Louvre in Ruins, which Hubert Robert completed in 1796.