The council advises board members to compare their fees to those of trustees who perform similar work at other foundations. But such research is tedious and generally inconclusive. Pablo Eisenberg, the lead author of a Georgetown University study of trustee stipends based on tax forms, found that pay varied widely. For example, the May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust in San Francisco paid its three board members $250,000 each in 1998 for four hours of work a month. The Houston Endowment, by contrast, paid its seven trustees $10,000 each for four hours of work a week.

Since trustees sometime act as foundation officers, an investigation of trustee fees alone does not tell the whole story. Sometimes trustees are paid healthy salaries but also hire professionals to run the office, and it is hard to tell where the board begins and the staff ends.

One example from the Georgetown study is the Park Foundation in Ithaca, N.Y. In 2001, when its endowment hovered around $550 million, the foundation gave its six senior trustees a total of $899,688, according to its tax form, even though none of them are listed as working more than half time. Its president, Dorothy D. Park, the widow of founder and newspaper publisher Roy H. Park, received $167,688 for a job that records indicate required 7.9 hours a week. The current executive director, Linda Madeo, says that Park spends her “whole life” on foundation business, and that the figure on the tax form is wrong. The salaried employees (there were several at the time) merely provide office support, according to Madeo, who claims that Park’s current salary is less than $100,000, in part because the endowment was split in two when her son, Roy Jr., left the board to set up the Triad Foundation with his children.