Biography | Adam Smith — The Moral Philosophy Chair on Glasgow High Street

People remember Adam Smith as an economist who happened to teach.

The work that made him was a Glasgow chair on this High Street.

He had already been a student here from 1737, arriving at fourteen to hear Francis Hutcheson lecture in English rather than Latin.

In 1751 the college appointed him Professor of Logic.

The next year he moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy, the post he held until he resigned in 1764 to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch on the Continent.

The Old College occupied land granted on the east side of the High Street in 1460, immediately north of the Blackfriars church.

Lectures ran in those courts, not on the Gilmorehill campus that replaced them after 1870.

The outer courtyard site is recorded at about this pin.

Nothing of the teaching rooms survives in place.

The Lion and Unicorn staircase was salvaged and rebuilt at Gilmorehill.

A later plaque on Blackfriars Road marks the vanished gateway.

Here he lectured daily from half past seven, then again three times a week at eleven, to classes that could number ninety boys.

The course covered natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy.

The last of those was already present in the classroom years before The Wealth of Nations.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759, grown from the ethics lectures given in these courts.

He also served as library quaestor, Dean of Faculty, and later Vice-Rector.

He lived rent-free in Professors' Court with his mother and his cousin Janet Douglas.

When Glasgow elected him Rector in 1787 he described the thirteen years on this site as the most useful, and therefore the happiest and most honourable, period of his life.

The visitor now finds a street of later masonry and the ghost of a goods yard.

The pin is the college that trained him and then employed him, not the Victorian tower three miles west.

Photo: etching after James Tassie's 1787 medallion, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.