ABSTRACT
University teaching is the key profession of the twentieth century. In a world increasingly dominated by the professional expert, on whose competence, reliability and integrity not merely the functioning of complex industrial society but the very survival of civilization, if not of the human race itself, has come to depend, university teachers have become the educators and selectors of the other professions. The last stage in the decline of the ancient universities as centres of learning and professional education came with the final triumph of the landed class over the Crown at the Civil War and Revolution of the seventeenth century. Before the reforms of the early nineteenth century, in fact, it is doubtful whether there was a university teaching profession in any meaningful sense, at least in England. By 1580, the transition from training centres for the learned professions to finishing schools for young gentlemen was already well under way.
