Roberts, College Education, and "Prejudices"

I've missed blogging the last few weeks because of family (parental) health issues and a Northern-California vacation; but I've enjoyed dipping into the others' discussions.

The Times has an interesting story on John Roberts' intellectual development,i.e. the crystallization of his conservatism at Harvard as an undergrad and law student in the mid and late 70s, when campus conservatives were viewed as political freaks and intellectual jokes.  The quote that interested me is from Harvard lawprof (and leading critical-legal-studies theorist) Morton Horwitz, who didn't teach Roberts but recently read an undergraduate paper Roberts wrote on Daniel Webster's conservative philosophy.

It seemed apparent to [Horwitz, from reading the paper,] that Judge Roberts "was a conservative looking for a conservative ideology in American history."

"It was interesting to me how self-conscious it was in terms of his own discovery of where he stood," said Professor Horwitz, a self-described liberal. "My guess is he came to Harvard College with conservative prejudices and tried to educate those prejudices whenever he had the opportunity." Some students lose their prejudices, he said. "But others, especially the more intellectual types, actually educate their prejudices."

I think that Horwitz describes a real pair of phenomena that happen to students:  those who just drop the the simplistic beliefs with which they came, and those who retain the basic beliefs but discover that there is more sophisticated foundation for them than they ever had known (and who perhaps develop a more sophisticated content to the beliefs as a result).  I trust, though, that in speaking of "prejudices" he's not just referring to conservative beliefs, but to students' entering beliefs in general.  Of course, in one sense having "prejudices" is not a bad thing and is inevitable -- our deepest beliefs about the world are underdetermined by pure reason and evidence (underdetermined not undetermined), and they reflect, in significant part, existential commitments that we make as individuals and in various communities.  As a crit, you would think Horwitz would affirm that this is so for liberal beliefs as well as conservative beliefs.  To that extent, "educating one's prejudices" could be something quite different -- and much more intellectually respectable -- than just finding confirmation for whatever silly thing one thinks.  As to the silly things, we hope that students "lose their prejudices."  But again, I'm sure that Horwitz allows that liberal as well as conservative beliefs can be silly, and that switching at college from a widespread middle-American conservatism to a widespread campus-based liberalism is often a case of switching prejudices (now in the bad sense of prejudices) rather than losing them.

Tom B.