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Cash cows amid bulls and bears

Commercial sponsorship of an academic's research for the benefit of his university is usually strictly separated from any private consultancy activity. If the money is not going to the university, the work is not considered to be "research".

But universities face a dilemma about how to handle practitioner-academics, who could treble their salaries if they left academia for the outside world.

Leading business academics routinely take on private work. They welcome the chance to visit the real world and view the pay as an top-up to measly academic salaries.

In the past, dividing lines were hazy, and there was less tolerance. Eight years ago, two academics from the then Polytechnic of Wales's Welsh Regional Management Centre had to resign when inspectors found them to have been involved in private work.

But guidelines are still limited. Cambridge frowns on academics involved in more than one day a week of private consultancy work.

It is at Oxford University's Said Business School that some of the most controversial proposals have emerged. Oxford's standard professorial salary is Pounds 40,500 but the school's director, John Kay, wants his professors to be paid double that. Before that battle is fought, the university has arranged to allow certain lecturers to be paid a supplement of Pounds 10,000 in exchange for not undertaking more than 30 days of private consultancy work a year.