Colleges Are Abandoning the Classics — Down 70% Since 2008

The 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 change
Diderot 0.027714 0.0025916 -90.64876957
Thucydides 0.10137 0.011824 -88.33579955
Petrarch 0.060532 0.0074508 -87.69113857
Aristophanes 0.090434 0.0115 -87.2835438
Tacitus 0.039382 0.0053452 -86.42730181
Boccaccio 0.040112 0.0055071 -86.27069206
Erasmus 0.026255 0.0037254 -85.81070272
Francis Bacon 0.033548 0.0051832 -84.54989865
Virgil 0.061991 0.010042 -83.80087432
Victor Hugo 0.009481 0.0016197 -82.91635903
Xenophon 0.035736 0.006317 -82.32314753
Montesquieu 0.040841 0.0076128 -81.35990794
Dostoevsky 0.060532 0.011338 -81.26941122
Voltaire 0.080953 0.015388 -80.99143948
John Dryden 0.012041 0.0023654 -80.3554522
Horace 0.078036 0.015388 -80.280896
Hesiod 0.040112 0.0084227 -79.00204428
Thomas Hobbes 0.080953 0.017331 -78.59128136
Aeschylus 0.058344 0.012634 -78.34567393
Tolstoy 0.080953 0.018303 -77.39058466
Homer 0.18451 0.042923 -76.73676224
Seneca 0.081682 0.019923 -75.60906932
Dante 0.11231 0.028669 -74.47333274
Moliere 0.043758 0.011338 -74.08930938
Euripedes 0.081682 0.021381 -73.82409833
Samuel Johnson 0.032089 0.0084227 -73.75206457
Goethe 0.030631 0.0082607 -73.03156933
Ovid 0.061991 0.017169 -72.30404414
Sophocles 0.14149 0.041303 -70.80853771
Edmund Burke 0.034277 0.010366 -69.75814686
Friedrich Nietzsche 0.18816 0.057339 -69.52646684
John Locke 0.074593 0.022806 -69.42608556
Edmund Spenser 0.010279 0.0031979 -68.88899698
Chaucer 0.11742 0.037092 -68.41083291
David Hume 0.057615 0.018303 -68.23223119
Cicero 0.064179 0.020409 -68.19987846
Cervantes 0.053239 0.017007 -68.05537294
Christopher Marlowe 0.014684 0.0050494 -65.61291201
Herodotus 0.043029 0.014902 -65.36754282
John Milton 0.044488 0.01555 -65.04675418
Charles Dickens 0.032089 0.011662 -63.65732806
Kant 0.30631 0.11176 -63.51408704
Jonathan Swift 0.048134 0.018465 -61.63834296
Plato 0.46019 0.17671 -61.60064321
Shakespeare 0.48863 0.19226 -60.65325502
Marcus Aurelius 0.013127 0.0055071 -58.04753561
Aristotle 0.39966 0.17655 -55.82495121
Schiller 0.098456 0.046163 -53.11306573
Descartes 0.199983 0.096699 -51.64638994
John Donne 0.026431 0.012876 -51.28447656
John Keats 0.037195 0.018465 -50.35623068
Mary Shelley 0.039382 0.019761 -49.82225382
Epictetus 0.024067 0.017817 -25.9691694
Edgar Allan Poe 0.02555 0.028276 10.66927593
Average decline: -69.83809964