On a Friday evening this month, Gordon Gee, one of the wealthiest college administrators in the country, will board a two-hour Southwest Airlines flight bound for Providence, R.I. From there, Gee will make the short drive to suburban Pawtucket, home of toy manufacturer Hasbro Inc. The trip to Pawtucket is a familiar to Gee, the 60-year-old chancellor of Vanderbilt University. He’s been a member of the Hasbro board of directors since 1999 when he was joined during his tenure as president of Brown University, in Providence. The morning after his flight, a Saturday, Gee will be up early. He’s a member of the Hasbro committee overseeing executive salaries, a group that meets as early as 7 a.m. to accommodate Gee’s tight schedule. Over lunch, Gee will likely attend a Vanderbilt fundraising event. Gee calls these luncheons “two-fers” or “three-fers” because they aren’t the main reason for his trip to Pawtucket. After lunch, Gee will probably attend the main board meeting with Hasbro’s 12 other directors, a group that includes Alan Hassenfeld, chairman of the board and grandson of Henry Hassenfeld, who founded Hasbro in the 1920s; Alan R. Batkin, a former investment banker who is a vice president in Henry Kissinger’s business consulting firm; Frank Biondi, former CEO of HBO who resigned as head of Universal Studios in 1998, shortly after the release of Meet Joe Black; and Jack Greenberg, former CEO of McDonald’s whom Forbes magazine once dubbed one of the country’s most powerful businessmen. “I’ve met some of the most interesting, dynamic people in the country by sitting on boards,” Gee says. When Gee was president of Ohio State University in the mid-1990s, he sat on the Banc One board with John R. Hall, the former CEO of petroleum giant Ashland Inc. and one of the Vanderbilt trustees instrumental in bringing Gee to Nashville. “It’s opened up doors for me,” he says. For the day-and-a-half session at Hasbro, Gee will be paid $1,500. That fee is in addition to a yearly $45,000 retainer Hasbro pays to its directors as well as 25,744 shares of Hasbro stock Gee purchased under favorable terms set by the company. Four other for-profit boards Gee sits on are equally lucrative. Two of them are based in Tennessee. The Dollar General Store, where Gee has been a board member since 2000, pays $12,500 per board meeting plus a $25,000-per-year retainer and 4,600 shares of stock per year. The hospitality giant Gaylord Entertainment, which owns Opryland and three other palatial resorts, the Ryman Auditorium and WSM Radio, pays Gee a $30,000 retainer and the option to buy 10,000 shares of Gaylord stock. (Gee owns a total of 24,500 Gaylord shares.) The Massey Energy Company, based in Richmond, grants directors nearly 7,000 shares of stock upon arrival to its board, which Gee joined in 2000. And one of Gee’s corporate memberships, the clothing chain The Limited, a holdover from his Ohio State days, pays Gee a $40,000 retainer, $40,000 annually in stock and $10,000 for sitting on the compensation committee. (Gee owns a total of 42,000 Limited shares.) To date, the estimated compensation of Gee’s participation on for-profit boards has come to more than $3.1 million—not bad for part-time jobs that Gee says are a kind of “therapy” for him. (University officials say the total figure is actually smaller, because Gee hasn’t availed himself of all stock options available to him.) “The university can be very isolating. I get to see how other people do there work, how they attack problems. It’s very empowering.” There are few, if any, critics of Gee’s extracurricular activities. Faculty members interviewed for this article were largely supportive of the chancellor, a likeable, charismatic figure who has been known to hand out cookies in the shape of bow ties—one of his favorite fashion accessories—during freshmen orientation. Those who meet Gee often describe him as energetic and even exciting. “Chancellor Gee’s service on corporate boards, I believe, is an expectation of his work as chancellor of the Vanderbilt University,” John McCarthy, a comparative literature professor and chair of the faculty senate, writes in an email. “If he were not invited to serve on such boards, now that would be a concern.” Martha Ingram, the book-distribution magnate who chairs Vanderbilt’s trustee board, says the hours Gee spends on corporate boards haven’t detracted from his day-to-day responsibilities at Vanderbilt. Besides the five for-profits, Gee also sits on 17 nonprofits, including Circle of Hope, the National Hospice Foundation and Artists and Scholars in Public Life. None of the non-profit boards compensate Gee for his involvement. (When the Scene spoke with Gee recently, he was coming out of a meeting of the Montgomery Bell Academy, a private boy’s school of which Gee is a board member.) Martha Ingram, the book-distribution magnate who chairs Vanderbilt’s trustee board, says the hours Gee spends on corporate boards haven’t detracted from his day-to-day responsibilities at Vanderbilt. Besides the five for-profits, Gee also sits on 17 nonprofits, including Circle of Hope, the National Hospice Foundation and Artists and Scholars in Public Life. None of the non-profit boards compensate Gee for his involvement. (When the Scene spoke with Gee recently, he was coming out of a meeting of the Montgomery Bell Academy, a private boy’s school of which Gee is a board member.) “Anyone who watches Chancellor Gee knows how present and active he is on our campus, and at the same time it's important for our chancellor to live in the larger world and have relationships that benefit the university,” Ingram wrote in an email sent through her publicist. “He has many relationships that are beneficial to us, but it's clear his priority is always Vanderbilt University.” No doubt Gee is given some leeway because he’s avoided the appearance of a conflict of interest, unlike his predecessor, Joe Wyatt, who sat on the board of Martha Ingram’s company, Ingram Industries, while still Vanderbilt chancellor. For a one-year period in the mid-1990s, Wyatt and Ingram’s tenure on the Vanderbilt and Ingram boards overlapped, blurring the working relationship between the two—one that some faculty members quietly criticized. Though Gee doesn’t have a conflict as apparent as Wyatt’s, some observers still anticipate his board memberships will present awkward situations. For example, will his allegiance to Gaylord Entertainment place him in opposition to city officials who will soon consider building a new downtown convention center that could compete with Opryland’s 280,000-square-foot facility? Convention center advocates say it’s still too early to tell who might oppose the idea, especially since both sides are waiting for the completion of a study to determine cost and financing. “It’s too early to assess how people may be lined up,” says Peter Heidenreich, whose lobbying firm, the Ingram Group, will likely be called upon to run a pro-convention center campaign. The trend toward university presidents sitting on for-profit corporate boards seems to have originated about 25 years ago as presidents became more involved in fundraising. In those two decades a kind of hierarchy has been established. Presidents of Division One research institutions are often invited to join corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Richard Levin of Yale University sits on Satmetrix, a customer satisfaction company, and Lucent Technologies. John Hennessey of Stanford sits on the boards of Cisco and Google. Ruth Simmons, who succeeded Gee at Brown, is a member of Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and Texas Instruments. At the other end of the spectrum are small-college presidents like Bob Fisher of Belmont University, whose board memberships include two banks, one of which, the Southern Development Bank, invests dividends in such philanthropic ventures as job development in the Arkansas Delta. Both bank jobs pay Fisher less than $10,000 per year. Fisher also sits on the board of a number of charitable organizations, including the Nashville Symphony, the YMCA, United Way and Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, for which he receives no compensation. It’s easy to see what corporations receive from university presidents: credibility and integrity. As Gee says, because he’s the president of a major university, with its emphasis on critical thinking and truth-seeking, he’s viewed as independent of the conflicts perhaps tarnishing the reputations of other corporate directors. Some observers worry that university administrators could eventually be caught up in the same corporate sleaziness that produced WorldCom and Enron. David Harpool, former president of Argosy University of Chicago and Kendall College in Evanston, says the standards of corporations have eroded to the point where there’s an anything-goes attitude, even in the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Congressionally-mandated protection that calls for additional auditing of corporate finances. Harpool’s larger point is that university administrators don’t have to join corporate boards merely because they are asked, or even to enhance university fundraising. “Can’t they raise money without having to officially serve on a board?” he asks. “I’m not sure there’s an argument why a university president would have to join a board to raise money.” Of course, nobody is supposed to ask whether corporate money is a corrupting influence on higher education—not in an era where professors spin off companies based on research they conduct between classroom time. (Stanford faculty, in particular, are known for this.) Richard Ingram, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, a group instilling professionalism among college trustees, called questions about the link between capitalism and higher education “naïve” and “inappropriate.”   “University presidents are not selling their souls by joining corporate boards,” he says. “They are often asked to be a conscience of the board, to be sensitive to larger social issues.” That sensitivity should translate into an obligation to continually educate corporate officials about ethics. “Let’s face it, a university president is not on a corporate board because he’s a wonderful guy,” says Vanderbilt philosophy professor John Lachs. “He’s there because he’s the president of a university. He’s not there to make the company more money. That’s not his bag. He’s there to dress up all the fancy terms like company values and morality and education. He’s an educator and as such he has a special responsibility to teach the fundamental rules of morality.”