AbstractThe part-time professor can play an important role in the university in establishing and maintaining relations with the environment of application and practice (such as industry). Closer inspection of the acivities and views of part-time professors shows that their role must be different in different fields in order to establish valuable contacts.The hypothesis that the benefits of these relationships are such that the universities have primarily financial interests whereas practice profits by access to new bodies of knowledge, does not seem to hold for the Netherlands. For many sections of society, like industry, professions or state institutions, the traditional task of the university, which is education, is much more important than its research function, whereas in its turn the university often needs access to knowledge that is developed elsewhere. Research on part-time professors can clarify many of these topics.