ABSTRACT
The Association uniting the professorial and non-professorial levels of university teaching which came into existence on 28 June 1919 was inevitably, and for long remained, a professional body run by amateurs. In the first place, since it was a very small profession, it was inevitably a very small association. In 1919–20, its first full year of existence, there were only 2,277 full-time university teachers in Great Britain, excluding Oxford and Cambridge which took no part in the Association of University Teachers (A.U.T) until the 1930's, and these had risen only to 3,819 by 1938–39. In addition to all the internal or exclusively academic professional Sub-committees, albeit with non-A.U.T. members, the Association also consciously sought to appoint a whole range of joint committees with other bodies and organizations sharing a common interest. R. Douglas Laurie's first recruiting letter to university teachers stated plainly: The aim of the Association is twofold, educational and economic.
