Found this on Campus Nonsense:

A few definitions:

The Government 30* syllabus from Dartmouth includes terms you need to know, such as:

“Left — favoring a greater degree of equality (social, economic, political)

Right — favoring a greater degree of inequality, believing that a select few should have power based on birth or merit

Radical — favoring fast, large changes toward equality

Liberal — (the narrow, modern definition) favoring slow, gradual changes toward equality

Classical liberal — favoring a system of free markets and competitive individualism

Conservative — favoring slow, gradual changes toward inequality”

Email the professor, Michael Krasner.

(Originally posted by Rollo Begley on DartLog)

There’s a bit of plausible deniability** in the comments section — perhaps this class was dealing in some way with antiquated political labels — but I’m a bit skeptical on that account. After all, “supporting a hierchical social system,” say, is far less loaded a description than is “favoring inequality,” but Krasner chose the latter.

Oh well. I suppose I can always email the Doc and ask for clarification…

*Government 30 is a “special topics in government” course; topics are fluid.

**[update: Here’s the course description of Krasner’s class:

This course will discuss American politics and the mass media with special attention to the news. The questions we will discuss include: What role does the media play in our political system? What are the general patterns of media coverage? Does the media generally provide the information citizens need to form opinions and make decisions? Or does the media operate in a way that limits or distorts information and undermines democratic participation? We will follow current coverage in the New York Times and other media outlets. Comparisons of the Times coverage with other American media outlets and foreign media will be part of the discussion. In addition to trying to promoting a better understanding of the media’s role in American politics, the course aims to improve each student’s media consumption. By the end of the term you should understand how and why certain stories get into the news, how and why they are covered as they are, and how and why other situations are neglected and never covered at all. In other words, one goal of the course is to enable you to become a self-conscious reader, viewer, and listener, to enable you to ‘read between the lines’ of media coverage, and thus to better inform yourself. Dist: SOC; WCult: NA, pending faculty approval.

Nothing much to do with pre-20th political labels, it wouldn’t appear].