<p>momrath: the expression is from Leacock’s " My discovery of England" which contains a hilarious comparison between Oxford and the first tier American Universities of the time (1922). Anyway, “smoked at” was how he characterized the interaction between student and tutor. Nothing much happened in those days at lectures, students were educated by a tutor getting a few students in a room and smoking at them. Men who were systematically smoked at for four years turned into ripe scholars. On the dull student Oxford after a proper lapse of time conferred a pass degree which signified nothing more than that he lived and breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. But the student who had ability and interest beyond the ordinary was smoked at by his tutor until he kindled into flame. Perhaps what Leacock was really saying was that all a student really learns at university he learns from the life and environment that surrounds him, by the active operation of his own intellect and that for this the student requires continued and intimate contact with fellow students and tutors, a dormitory, a reading room in which to pontificate and solve the great problems of modern life, a library and perhaps a professor like Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and the student on the other . If that sounds like Williams then that is perhaps her spot. </p>
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