Andhra University is not just one of the oldest educational institutions in the country, but is also the first to be conceived as a residential and teaching-cum-affiliating University, mainly devoted to post-graduate teaching and research. The people of the State have an emotional attachment to the institution, since it came into being after a prolonged and collective struggle of the Telugu elite for a University in the educationally backward northern Circars and Ceded districts of the erstwhile Madras Presidency.