Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million.

And he rejected it — as too much.

“With many issues and concerns about administrative costs, affordability and tuition, such a salary will affect the ability of the president to work with the Texas Legislature,” Fenves wrote to a university official, in an email obtained by The Austin American-Statesman and published last week.

He suggested, and agreed to, $750,000.

That’s hardly chump change. But in the context of the shockingly lucrative deals that have become almost commonplace among college presidents, the sum — or, more precisely, the sentiment behind it — is worthy of note and praise.

Another of those deals came to light late Tuesday night, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Yale University had paid its former president, Richard Levin, an “additional retirement benefit” of $8.5 million after he retired from his post in 2013. The Journal characterized this as an “unprecedented lump-sum payment” for a college president and noted that Levin’s annual compensation package during his final years at Yale was already over $1 million.