ABSTRACT
There are now over 25,000 university teachers in Great Britain apart from some 2,000 part-timers. In some universities the distinction between readers and senior lecturers is a horizontal one: readers are recognized primarily for research and senior lecturers for teaching. Many variations between universities and faculties include Oxford and Cambridge where the staff structure is made very different in reality by the existence of the colleges and where the proportion of professors and readers is relatively low. Presumably the celibacy rule in Oxford and Cambridge, which continued into the i86os, must have distorted the age structure to produce a relatively old group of bachelor dons and a young group of unmarried fellows with comparatively few in their late thirties and forties. Age and sex would be instructive, though it is not possible from official statistics, to reconstruct the history of the age structure of the university professions.
