Tilghman nets over $500,000 from Google

Tilghman is one of many presidents of American universities who serve on a corporate board. Since her appointment in 2005, she has served on the Google board of directors and earns around $500,000 annually from her position at the company.

Tilghman said she was originally encouraged to work with Google by the Princeton University Board of Trustees.

“[The board] felt that it would be a good experience for me to see how governance of a major corporation is ... the ways in which it’s both similar and different from the way in which they govern the University,” Tilghman said.

Before working with Google, Tilghman served as the founding director and chair of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics beginning in 1998.

“I was working with an architect, the designer who ultimately built the Lewis-Sigler Institute, hiring faculty, raising money, doing on a small scale what presidents do on a large scale,” Tilghman said.

However, Tilghman said, before assuming her role as a director at Google she thought it would be important to become acquainted with her responsibilities as University president. She served as president for three years before deciding to join Google’s board.

“I felt I just simply needed to spend all of my time learning about Princeton [and] the parts of Princeton I didn’t know well,” Tilghman said.

But after her first three years on the job, the demands on her time diminished because she became accustomed to these duties, giving her the freedom to take on another role.

“When you do something for the very first time, it is immensely more time consuming and requires a lot more of your psychic energy,” Tilghman said.

Tilghman asserted that the amount of work that she puts into her duties at the University has not changed since she joined Google.

“I think the attention that Princeton gets today is every bit as significant as the attention that Princeton received before I went on the Google board,” Tilghman said.

As a director of Google, Tilghman is involved with many of its administrative decisions. The board of directors provides oversight to chief executive Larry Page and reviews Google’s strategic decisions. Its responsibilities include making decisions relating to the development of new products and to expansion into new geographic markets.

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“The board is ultimately responsible for the success or the failure of the company,” Tilghman said.

Additionally, Tilghman serves on Google’s Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee with Stanford President John Hennessy. The committee is responsible for conducting an annual review of the performance of the directors, as well as for recommending candidates to the board when there is an opening.

Tilghman said the overlap in the skills necessary to run the University and to work with Google is most apparent in attempting to recruit individuals to the institutions and provide an environment that would sustain them.

“If you ask Google what they believe is their most important priority, each and every day, it is to have the very best engineers working at Google,” Tilghman said. “The same thing is absolutely true at Princeton. If people ask me, ‘Why is Princeton such a successful university?’, it’s because of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty.”

From her work at Google, Tilghman said she learned a lot about how to attract top talent and how to keep talented people by creating a sense of community. She said she has tried to incorporate this experience into her work at the University.

Tilghman added that Google’s position as a leader on the frontier of information technology provides her with insights on how the University should adapt to changes in the field. Her work at Google helps her “see the future before it happens,” she said.

While the presence of university officials on corporate boards can present opportunities for conflicts of interest, Tilghman said she recuses herself from University decisions that involve Google.

In the event that such decisions come up, they are made by University Provost Christopher Eisgruber. Tilghman also said that she refrains from discussing or voicing her opinion regarding any Google-related decisions.

Furthermore, an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January said that a conflict of interest could present itself if a university president serves on the board of a company headed by members of his or her own university’s board of trustees. Currently, none of the members of the Princeton University Board of Trustees serves on Google’s board.

Harvard Business School faculty member Jay Lorsch said in the Chronicle article that a university president working on a board of a company that is connected to a university trustee is “just a no-no.”

However, Lorsch said in an interview that Tilghman was in the clear.

“There’s nothing wrong with that legally, nor I think even ethically, with being on the board of a company as long as you don’t let those conflicts of interest get in the way and as long as they are managed well,” he said.

Lorsch said that he is more concerned with the time commitment that might detract from University responsibilities.

“I think the bigger problem is where somebody gets on the board of too many of these companies ... and can’t do their day job while on these boards,” Lorsch said.

Part of Tilghman’s role as director involves travelling to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., four times each year for meetings. Tilghman said she also takes advantage of these trips to conduct University business in the Bay Area.

“I always use those trips to San Francisco in order to meet with Princeton alumni and conduct Princeton business so that the trips are never simply Google business,” Tilghman said. “Given that I would be out there four times a year anyway, it’s a very efficient use of my time.”

While many other university presidents serve on multiple corporate boards, Tilghman said that she doesn’t “feel any need to be on more than one board.”

“Unlike some of my peers, I feel that the benefit from sitting on a corporate board I can really fully receive by [just] being on the Google board,” Tilghman said.

In addition to serving on the Google board, she serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.