About us

The University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School celebrates the legacy of Adam Smith by developing enlightened and enterprising graduates and internationally recognised research with real socio-economic impact.

We help to transform organisations and careers. Our business is creating leaders, researchers, and professionals who can think critically, and who have the ability to affect organisations at the highest global level.

The University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), and the Glasgow MBA is accredited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA). The school is also home to research, of international and national excellence, that contributes to theoretical advancement and is relevant to practice.

Adam Smith and the University of Glasgow

Adam Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy. He entered Glasgow University in 1737 at the early - but for the time not unusual - age of fourteen. He returned to the University, first as Professor of Logic in 1751 and then a year later as Professor of Moral Philosophy, a post he held until he left academic life in 1764 for the more lucrative post of tutor/companion to the young Duke of Buccleuch. That was not his final association because in 1787 he was elected Rector of the University and in a letter of thanks he remarked that he remembered his professional days as

'by far the most useful and therefore as by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life.'

Beyond courses in philosophy and jurisprudence he also discoursed on history, literature and language and published essays on language and the history of astronomy. But the most notable other product of his Glasgow years is his second great book, Theory of Moral Sentiments which appeared in 1759. All Smith's work is deeply steeped in moral philosophy. Indeed the simple fact that the final edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments, containing extensive revisions appeared in 1790, the year of his death, tells us that Smith's commitment to the moral point of view endured alongside and beyond the publication of The Wealth of Nations.