Today marks the day in 1740 when the 17-year-old Adam Smith set off from his family home in Kirkcaldy to take up a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford.
He had always been a gifted student, in school and then at Glasgow University, which he entered at the age of 14, and where he was greatly influenced by the great moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson — libertarian, rationalist, utilitarian, plain speaker and thorn in the side of authority.
The journey to Oxford took him a month, on horseback. If thriving, commercial Glasgow had been an eye-opener to a boy from provincial Kirkcaldy, England was more like a different world. He wrote of the grandness of its architecture and the fatness of its cattle, quite unlike the poor specimens in Scotland.
Yet the English university education system did not impress him. Indeed, it gave him an important lesson on the power of perverse incentives, which he would catalogue acidly in his great 1776 work of economics, The Wealth of Nations.
The problem was that Oxford teachers were paid directly from college endowments, not from students’ fees as they were in Glasgow. It hardly encouraged their interest in their students. “In the University of Oxford,” wrote Smith, “the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.”
College life, he observed, was contrived “for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.” There were disciplines aplenty on the students, of course; but none on the teachers. But “no discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending,” rare though those were. Indeed, it was “well known” among the students “wherever any such lectures are given.”
Smith was becoming, not just an economist, but a social psychologist. The perverse incentives upon the Oxford teaching staff, he recognised, were just one example of a more general human trait: “It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit.”
And institutions like universities, he noted, “are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.”
Like other students, therefore, Smith learnt little from his Oxford teachers. Yet, thanks to Balliol’s world-class library and his own love of reading and learning, Smith was able to educate himself in the classics, literature, and other subjects. He left Oxford in 1746, before the expiry of his scholarship, to return to Kirkcaldy, where he began to write essays and articles that would make his reputation and launch his academic career.
Today, a small bronze bust of Adam Smith, created by the distinguished Victorian sculptor Carlo Marochetti, is preserved in Balliol College. What Adam Smith thought of Oxford, however, is preserved in an even more permanent form: his cutting words on a failed education system that so badly let him down.