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‪The American University of Beirut (AUB) has been defined as a hub for social research and the training of expert elites during the Mandate, thanks to the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and under its guidance. The AUB was not alone in developing a teaching of sociology before Independence. Yet its teaching can best be characterised as instrumental, rather than professionalising. The goal was to train leaders, and in order to achieve this, to raise awareness of the major debates and methods of sociology among the bulk of the university's students, without inducing them to specialise in sociology. Social work, an activity of growing importance at AUB over the 1930s, provided AUB teachers with a way to take students out of the cosiness of the alma mater, and to get them to implement the ideas they had been confronted with in class. The notion of leadership hid two central concerns. The AUB aimed at getting the children of the local elites, who made the bulk of AUB students, to live up to what was assumed to be their political and social responsibility, through the experience of social work that was complementary to the introduction to sociology. Awareness of the denominational framing of social problems in the Middle East was supposed to help students overcome their own denominational upbringing.‪