… no university president comes anywhere close to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson. An article in Bloomberg about presidents sitting on corporate boards reviews Jackson’s steely focus on personal enrichment.

Jackson … sits on five corporate boards, more than most college presidents, after stepping down from a sixth in April. She traveled to Milwaukee and Houston to attend shareholder meetings for International Business Machines Corp. and Marathon Oil on two successive April days.

Shareholders at IBM, Marathon Oil, FedEx Corp. and NYSE Euronext filed proxy statements this year or in 2009 questioning Jackson’s ability to juggle jobs.

“Nobody should be sitting on that many boards,” said Emil Rossi, the trustee for shares who filed a proxy statement with his son to protest Jackson’s board nomination at Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider. Of 14 candidates, Jackson placed 11th in the voting and retained her seat. While getting the fewest votes for election at Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a Newark, New Jersey-based utility, she also held her board post there.

Founded in 1824, RPI is the nation’s oldest technological university, according to its website. Jackson earned $1.6 million from RPI in the year ended June 30, 2008, making her the highest-paid leader of a nonprofit private college in the U.S., according to the latest rankings by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jackson also reaped $982,628 in fees and other compensation such as stock awards from IBM, Public Service, New York-based NYSE Euronext and Marathon Oil in 2009, plus $403,823 from FedEx and Medtronic Inc., a Minneapolis-based medical-device maker, for their latest completed fiscal years, proxy statements show.

Faculty members said Jackson isn’t devoting enough attention to RPI’s endowment losses and credit issues. In May 2009, RPI had its debt downgraded to A3 from A2 by Moody’s Investors Service. While retaining the rating, Moody’s in March changed RPI’s outlook to “stable” from “negative.” RPI’s endowment fell 23 percent in a year, to $612.8 million on June 30, 2009, according to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, based in Washington.

“Her first priority needs to be this university,” said Jim Napolitano, a professor of physics at RPI since 1992.

… Jackson declined to be interviewed…

There’s lots of other stuff in the article about people like Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, who as a Goldman Sachs director “approved a $67.9 million bonus, still a Wall Street record, for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.” It’s worth reading in full.

The Bloomberg writer notes that corporate board sitting takes presidents away from their campus responsibilities, makes them vulnerable to lawsuits, and poses many ethical hazards. So why do presidents do it?

An expert in the field says: “Universities are feeling the pressure for fundraising, and [presidents] think creating these linkages will bring them more philanthropy, although there’s no evidence to suggest that actually happens.”

The philanthropy theory is a very nice way of trying to account for why corporate boards are so irresistable… But as this observer notes, there’s no evidence things work like that.

The simplest explanation seems to UD the best: Sitting on corporate boards is the easiest, pleasantest way in the whole wide world to scare up enormous sums of money for yourself.

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Update: Muckety provides a map.