The more things change...........

     After three years at Glasgow Smith went on to spend another six, from 1740 to 1746, as a student at Oxford University's Balliol College.   In stark contrast to his experience at Glasgow, Smith found his classes at Oxford exceedingly uninspiring.  He later remarked that the professors there has "given up altogether even the pretence of teaching," and he was also clearly thinking of Oxford when he wrote that the best endowed universities often serve as "sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection, after they had been hunted out of every other corner of the world."

-Dennis C. Rasmussen,  The Infidel And The Professor:  David Hume, Adam Smith, And The Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought