Smiling…

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students. The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Wooly Thinking) that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too. And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

(P. 14, from Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett)