[5] The AAU's founding members elected Harvard's Charles William Eliot as the association's first president[1] and Stanford's David Starr Jordan as its first chairman.

[7] For its first six decades, the AAU functioned as a club for the presidents and deans of elite research universities to informally discuss educational matters, and its day-to-day operations were managed by an executive secretary.

[9] Today, the AAU consists of 71 U.S. and Canadian universities of varying sizes and missions that share a commitment to research.

The organization's primary purpose is to provide a forum for the development and implementation of institutional and national policies in order to strengthen programs in academic research, scholarship, and education at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels.

"[8] For example, in 2010 the chancellor of nonmember North Carolina State University described it as "the pre-eminent research-intensive membership group.

"[11] A spokesman for nonmember University of Connecticut called it "perhaps the most elite organization in higher education.

[13] Because of the lengthy and difficult entrance process, boards of trustees, state legislators, and donors often see membership as evidence of the quality of a university.

Approximately two-thirds of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2006 Class of Fellows are affiliated with an AAU university.

In 2014, the AAU supported the proposed Research and Development Efficiency Act arguing that the legislation "can lead to a long-needed reduction in the regulatory burden currently imposed on universities and their faculty members who conduct research on behalf of the federal government.