What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

2 Strikes, 2 Outcomes

It must say something about our times that a strike by some 750 dining-hall workers at Harvard University appears to have to gained more attention — and to have won the strikers more of what they sought — than a strike by 5,000 faculty members and coaches on the 14 campuses of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Both actions have now ended, with different outcomes.

The Harvard walkout shuttered a half-dozen of the university’s dining spots for three weeks, although others remained open with managers and student employees filling in and taking advantage of frozen foods the university had stockpiled. The dining-hall workers, who had been working without a contract for months, sought a new minimum annual income of $35,000 and opposed an effort to shift some health-care costs to them.

The university maintained that the workers were already paid well by comparison with people with similar jobs in the region. But an institution with a $35.7-billion endowment doesn’t get much traction when it argues that it needs to hold down the wages of people at the low end of its pay scale — especially if those people interact with students and others on the campus two or three times a day. The strike ended last week shortly after several hundred students walked out of classes in support of the strikers, and after about 100 students showed up for a sit-in at the site of contract negotiations.

Brian Lang, president of Unite Here Local 26, told The Boston Globe that the union had “achieved every goal without exception, with no concessions to Harvard.”

The faculty members who went on strike in Pennsylvania made no such claim after they ended their three-day strike, which affected more than 100,000 students. In fact, the union — the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties — said in a news release that it had “accepted concessions to salary and benefits,” and in return the university system had dropped demands for a wide variety of other contract changes.

According to the union, those changes would have led to more teaching by adjuncts and graduate students, a bigger workload but no pay increase for adjunct faculty members, and more emphasis on distance education. Among the union’s concessions, it said, were agreeing to “a salary package that was significantly lower than that of the other unions.”

“Our primary goals,” said Kenneth M. Mash, the union president, “were to preserve quality education for our students, protect our adjuncts from exploitation, and make sure the varieties of faculty work are respected.”

A spokesman for the system noted that the deal did include raises for union members. But with enrollment down at many of the system’s institutions, the demographic outlook for high-school students in the state bleak over the next dozen years, and the state budget an object of bitter partisan fighting, the system’s prospects are far from ideal.

William G. Bowen

William G. Bowen, who died on October 20 at the age of 83, had been an influential figure in American higher eduction for some 50 years. An economist who was named president of Princeton University in 1972, when he was 38, he led the institution for 16 years and, among other things, oversaw the creation of its residential-college system. He left in 1988 to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where he encouraged the organization’s interests in the humanities, arts and culture, and undergraduate and graduate education. Even after retiring from Mellon a decade ago, Mr. Bowen remained active on a variety of higher-education issues.

He is also remembered as the author of a number of important books, most notably The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, which he wrote in 1998 with Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. He was also founder of Ithaka, a nonprofit organization devoted to using technology to benefit colleges and high schools. Among its offerings are the digital library JSTOR and Ithaka S&R, the organization’s research wing.

Ithaka posted a particularly graceful remembrance: “As a scholar Bill was an economist, and his prodigious and influential work was grounded in careful reliance on data and evidence, and as a man, he was the consummate humanist. He reveled in collegial collaboration and brought out the best in others through his extraordinary generosity, immense intellectual curiosity, and boundless energy. History will remember him as one of the singularly great civic leaders of our time; those of us fortunate to have known him will remember him for the friendship, guidance, and joy he shared that fundamentally changed the course of our lives.”

• Tom Hayden, who in the 1960s was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and a key voice of the social-justice and antiwar movements, died last week. Mr. Hayden, who later taught at several colleges and served in the California Legislature, remained interested in higher-education issues throughout his life.

‘Jackie,’ Revisited

Ryan M. Kelly, The Daily Progress via AP Images

Testimony continued last week in the trial of the defamation lawsuit that a former University of Virginia administrator filed against Rolling Stone in the aftermath of the magazine’s 2014 account of an alleged gang rape in a UVa fraternity house. Among others, the jury heard from Elisabeth Garber-Paul, who said she had spent some 80 hours checking the article line by line. “When we went to print, I believed it all to be true,” she said. The magazine withdrew the article after articles in The Washington Post questioned its details.

Nicole P. Eramo, a former associate dean of students, sued the magazine and the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely (above), for $7.5 million, alleging that the article suggested Ms. Eramo had responded inadequately to sexual-assault claims. The suit says Rolling Stone was more worried about selling magazines than establishing facts.

The jury also heard recorded testimony from the woman at the center of the article, identified only as “Jackie.” She said she stood by her account of the assault but added: “There have always been certain things I can’t remember, and, you know, some things that I think I remember that I don’t know if I really remember.”

Million-Dollar Salaries

USA Today has tracked the rising salaries of top college coaches since 2006. Last week it took a hard look at “why schools fawn over star coaches and give them much of what they ask for during contract negotiations” — including golden parachutes that the newspaper says make the coaches “almost too expensive to fire.”

The explanation, USA Today concludes, is simple: Coaches help produce rising revenues, and “with contract guarantees, coaches also taking what they can get from the market.” The market for “somebody who can turn a flat brand name into a shiny national power practically overnight” is big, the paper says, and that assures that the coaches have the upper hand in salary talks. Currently pulling in the most money, according to the newspaper’s survey: Jim Harbaugh, football coach at the University of Michigan, who stands to make $9 million this year. Seventy-two coaches make more than $1 million a year, the survey found.

And This Ends Well

And finally: Last week brought something of a surprise in the realm of Shakespeare studies: A team of 23 scholars who used sophisticated big-data tools to compare language in the plays with texts written by others concluded that Christopher Marlowe should share credit for collaborating with Shakespeare on all three parts of Henry VI in the Oxford University Press’s New Oxford Shakespeare, the first volume of which was published last week.

Collaborations were not unusual in Shakespeare’s day, scholars say, but they’ve been hard to prove. Now, as The Guardian put it, researchers say computerized textual analysis “can even distinguish between Shakespeare writing under Marlowe’s influence and Marlowe writing alone.” Indeed, the scholars say 17 of Shakespeare’s 44 plays are not solely his work. Among their other findings: Thomas Middleton should get credit for adapting a script of Shakespeare’s into what we know as All’s Well That Ends Well.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.