It is the subject of campus novels from writers such as C.P. Snow and Malcolm Bradbury: the tension between the dreaming academics and the technicians who have to run the place and pay the bills.

If any institution can get the balance right, it should surely be Cass Business School, whose purpose has been to turn out bright students to run companies around the world. For the past five years, the chief operating officer of Cass has been Henrietta Royle, a former City investment banker.

The role was a new one. Academic institutions in the UK tend to be headed by a vice-chancellor, while the administrative toil is carried out by a secretary who may or may not be an academic and who often lacks the clout to operate effectively.

However, the notion of putting an administrator in charge of all non- academic business, whether it be fundraising, human resources, IT or the finances, is common in the US and is being adopted by more forward- looking institutions here.

For this reason, Ms Royle will in August switch across from running Cass, to a similar newly created post at City University London, Cass's parent. From running one of the main subsidiaries, she will be promoted to running the plc. “They had seen what I had been able to achieve at Cass, where you had somebody thinking about what the organisation needed in terms of investment and what the priorities were,” she says. “It's a much more businesslike structure.”

Ms Royle was educated at Benenden and Cambridge, where she read English, and then headed straight into corporate finance. Her father, Timothy Royle, worked in insurance and was a founder of Control Risks, the consultancy that advises on working in dangerous environments abroad. He has just embarked, in his early seventies, on an improbable second career as an undertaker.

Had Ms Royle ever expected to end up in academia? “Not in a million years,” she says. “When I left Cambridge, I thought, ‘That's the last I see of any academic institution'.”

At Cambridge, there was a clear hierarchy among those heading for the City. At the bottom were those earmarked for insurance, written off as irredeemably dull and stupid. Next up came potential stockbrokers. At the apex was M&A and corporate finance.

This latter option came with an added advantage. “I was fed up with doing exams,” Ms Royle recalls. Insurance, stockbroking, accountancy and law all required further qualifications. “The only people who didn't in those days were investment bankers, because the FSA exams didn't exist then.”

Ms Royle joined Manufacturers Hanover, the American bank, because it had a highly rated training scheme. “The trouble was, once I arrived I discovered you only got sent on it if you were in New York.” She learnt about syndicated loans and swaps, then in their infancy, and “how money moved around the world and how to track it”. This knowledge has come in useful at Cass. “Sometimes you will get told things by your bank and you will know it is rubbish.”

A friend knew the HR director at NM Rothschild, then run by the redoubtable Michael, later Sir Michael, Richardson and coining it from the privatisation boom. She joined and worked for Oliver Letwin, now in David Cameron's team - “Though I was taught English at Cambridge, it was Oliver who taught me how to write” - on various far-flung sell-offs in Canada, Jamaica, Pakistan and, increasingly, former Soviet countries.

This experience led her to the Prague office of the rival bank Barclays de Zoete Wedd for two years and then to Hong Kong and the Philippines. However, the rootless life of an investment banker began to pall.

“You start to lose touch with your friends. People stop bothering to invite you to dinner because they don't know whether you'll come or not. I was just over 30 and it wasn't a sensible way to live.”

She relocated to London with BZW, but failed to settle in the heavily regulated environment of domestic corporate finance. And there were other pressures that soured her homecoming. “You worked so hard that it didn't make any difference. It wasn't any better. Some people just love doing deals. They get that wonderful buzz out of it. I never got that. I looked at the managing directors and other very senior people and even they were working ridiculous hours.

“I said to myself, ‘Is it worth it?'. I knew I would get into the wealth trap where you couldn't afford to leave.”

Seeking a managerial job, she ended up as deputy chief executive of what used to be known as British Invisibles, the body that promoted UK financial services overseas and now sports the rather anonymous initials IFSL.

After a detour into PR and a spell using her City contacts book to sell an innovative bond for a charity that was, with hindsight, too innovative, she says, Ms Royle was approached to join Cass by its then Dean, Lord Currie of Marylebone, the Ofcom regulator, who had been on the charity's steering group.

Cass is named after the 17th century educational philanthropist Sir John Cass. He inconveniently died while drawing up his will, sparking three decades of legal wrangling over his estate, but the foundation that emerged offered what was then called City University Business School £5million towards new premises in Bunhill Row, north of the City.

The school moved out of three cramped floors in the Barbican five years ago, just as Ms Royle arrived, and the name was duly changed. “It's been a fantastic job, the best job I ever had,” she says. “I find management intellectually fascinating.”

A problem in academia is a tendency towards creation of competing fiefdoms. It is not unknown for different departments to offer rival degrees. Cass is organised into profit centres and cost centres, along an orthodox business model. “There is a quasi-internal market, which works,” Ms Royle says. “It makes it very easy to see the profitability of any particular product and whether it is working.”

Not all activities turn a profit. MBAs are effectively loss leaders. “No business school in the world makes money from MBAs because it's a very competitive market. But it's the key brand. It's how people judge a business school. You can't not have an MBA.”

Cass has an annual budget just short of £50million, which has ballooned from less than £20million during her time there. Her next job, at City University, gives her control of a budget of £150million. Cass has about 3,000 students, whereas City has 24,000, although many of those are part-time. Ms Royle claims to get on well with “Generation Y”, which provides the current intake, but marvels at the insouciance with which they treat their jobs, and their willingness to drop out of them, probably a consequence of years of affluence. “If there aren't so many jobs around in the next couple of years, will they change their attitudes?”

Ms Royle last summer married Michael Llewelyn-Jones, a merchant banker. They met at a dinner for alumni of Cass, which he attended, and she says that Cass has therefore provided her with both the perfect job and a perfect husband.

Does she have regrets about leaving the highly paid world of investment banking? “Yes, I can see my friends and they've got these big houses, but I'm very happy. I earn enough. I'm never going to be a multi-millionaire working in higher education, but so what?”

Henrietta Royle

Born
21 May 1962, Leamington Spa

Educated
Benenden and Downing College, Cambridge, and in 2006 Advanced Management Programme, Harvard Business School

Career
1985-1994: investment banker, Manufacturers Hanover, NM Rothschild, Barclays de Zoete Wedd 1996-2000: chief executive, Ceenet, deputy chief executive, British Invisibles (now IFSL). 2001-2002: chief executive, City & East London Bond Project Since 2002: chief operating officer, Sir John Cass Business School.

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