That is the title of my new paper (preprint available here via SSRN), which will be published in an upcoming issue of History of Economic Ideas, a refereed journal specializing in the history of economic thought. (This is one of the papers I was editing over the weekend.) My paper attempts to confirm the veracity of the oft-told story about Adam Smith having been reprimanded by his academic superiors at Oxford for having read one of David Hume’s early works, perhaps Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. Among other things, a reviewer brought to my attention the fact that neither C. R. Fay’s biography Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day nor Lord Keynes’s introduction to David Hume’s “Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, 1740” mention the supposed Oxford incident. Although the absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, these omissions are revealing and support my tentative verdict that “the Balliol College conspiracy” is more likely than not pure fiction.