My sourcebooks disagree, but it was in July 1740, I think on this day, that Adam Smith matriculated into Balliol College, Oxford. He had won a place there as Snell Exhibitioner. His journey from Scotland, on horseback, had started in June.

There were just a handful of Scots students in Balliol at the time, and their time there was not altogether happy. Their strange dialect and manners caused them to be treated almost as foreigners.

And Smith would discover that Balliol was certainly no haven of free thought. When his (Jacobite) masters found him reading David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, a gift to him from the author, they censured him and confiscated the ungodly book.

But at Oxford, Smith would learn something about incentives, which would form a major foundation of his subsequent views on economics. Teaching staff were salaried, whether or not their classes attracted students. At Oxford, he noted, "the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching."

"The discipline of colleges and universities," he went on, "is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters."

No doubt things have changed.