As it turns out, those extravagant raises for five executives at the University of Connecticut, four of whom were already being paid more than $250,000 per year, were not essential for retaining great staff, contrary to what UConn President Susan Herbst had insisted. Under pressure from legislative leaders, Herbst announced last week that the raises for three of the executives were being reduced substantially — and the executives didn’t quit.

Herbst and the equally arrogant and clueless chairman of UConn’s Board of Trustees, Lawrence McHugh, seem to have been told by leaders of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority that the raises would cause UConn a lot more trouble than replacing the executives — that the raises were mortifying the Democrats, providing a big issue for the minority Republicans, and would cause the Democrats, if they retained control of the General Assembly after the November election, to disembowel anyone from UConn who showed up at the state Capitol.

But Herbst herself, already being paid $750,000 per year, will still get another $165,000 in performance and retention bonuses, even though that performance just included grossly embarrassing the university and the legislative leaders.

Governor Malloy, who appoints UConn’s board, seems incapable of being embarrassed by the university. But then as chairman of the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee, he lately has had to guard against embarrassments on a national scale and seems to have succeeded in that respect anyway.

Credit for getting the raises reduced begins with the Connecticut Mirror’s Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, who disclosed them several weeks ago. (UConn’s huge publicity machine somehow neglected to issue a press release about them.)

But the leader of the Senate’s Republican minority, Len Fasano of North Haven, gets credit for keeping the issue alive at the Capitol, noting that the Democratic legislative leaders were not backing up with action their criticism of the raises. Fasano proposed a special session of the General Assembly to consider legislation to increase the General Assembly’s supervision of the university. As newspapers began contrasting the extravagance at UConn with state government’s recent reduction in support for the innocent needy, the Democrats were finally shamed enough to speak sternly to Herbst and McHugh.

While there won’t be a special session about UConn, the university is overdue for a lot more auditing by the legislature, starting with how much research rather than instruction is being done by professors. When UConn says it wants to be “a great research university,” it means that nobody really wants to get his hands dirty teaching, which is work fit only for “adjuncts.” This is a policy decision that should stop being left to the university.

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MAYBE ALL LIVES MATTER NOW. The recent shootings of black men by white police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana and of white police officers by a black man in Dallas have given the impression that the country is racially riven. President Obama disputes this, and there is much evidence that he is right, since the country now is actually fairly united in shock and grief and resolved that “black lives matter” and “blue lives matter.”

Of course the shootings have produced some political opportunism and hysteria, too. Donald Trump this week pledged to be the “law and order” president. Last week a New Haven radio station broadcast an interview with a woman who claimed that blacks are being “hunted” by police, the kind of remark that would seem to invite the murder of police officers.

Yes, the country still has a racial problem. But the themes arising from the recent shootings are the common humanity of the victims and the pain of their survivors. Nearly everyone feels it. Maybe, at last, all lives matter now. That would be a start.