Text 2 　　Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from dean 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. Finally, he suggested, and agreed to, $750,000. 　　Ideally, higher education is dedicated to values different from those that govern Wall Street and corporate America. It supposedly calls students to more soulful concerns, even to sacrifice. But that message is confusing when some of the people who run colleges indulge in payments and allowances that would once have been considered vulgar. 　　Each extravagant compensation package breeds more like it, as schools' board members convince themselves that they must keep pace in order to recruit and retain the heavy hitters. They reason that “this is a winner-take-all society and that people with extremely high levels of talent are richly rewarded,” said Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. 　　“But I think that things are getting out of hand, especially given the tax-exempt nature of universities,” he added. “They're in privileged positions, and they were given these privileged positions not to enrich themselves but to serve society. These presidents are expected to live quite nicely but not ugly and not extravagantly.” 　　Their extravagance strikes an especially inharmonious note in light of the challenges confronting higher education today, and it undercuts their moral authority. How do you defend the transfer of teaching responsibilities to low-paid, part-time teachers when the president is sitting so pretty? How do you cut administrative costs, which indeed need cutting? How do you summon students back to the liberal arts and away from profit-oriented priorities? 　　The high salaries are frequently defended on the grounds that a university president's job is all consuming. But if it is, how do so many of them find time to serve, for hundreds of thousands of extra dollars, on corporate boards? Shirley Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was at one point on five boards simultaneously. 　　The high salaries are also defended in terms of the fund-raising that certain presidents reportedly excel at, covering their compensation many times over. But do they deserve sole credit for those donations? And at nonprofit institutions, should money be the main criterion and currency? Shouldn't ethics compete with economics, as they sometimes do when a school invests its endowment? 　　The lofty pay of college presidents is part of higher education's increasingly corporate trend, of the blurred lines between the campus and the marketplace.