Not that Lawrence or Kansas need more reasons to be proud of Kansas University, but a couple of events in the last several days offered snapshots of what KU means both to the state and to individual students.

KU plays host to notable people and events almost every day. Among the events last weekend was Saturday’s dedication of the new Hall Center for the Humanities, a wonderful structure that incorporated some of the oldest architecture on campus.

Later on Saturday, a local audience got a chance to observe a “conversation” with one of the KU theater department’s more famous former students, Mandy Patinkin. The intimate picture that emerged from the Murphy Hall event was of a warm, vulnerable actor who, although he attended KU for only two years, wanted to give something back to the university that had helped nurture his career.

Although Patinkin is known across the country for his Emmy-winning performance on TV’s “Chicago Hope,” his memorable role in “The Princess Bride,” and other stage and movie credits, there still are many people in Lawrence who remember him best for his performance as Tevya in a University Theatre production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when he was a student in 1971. In tribute to his father — and his KU audience — Patinkin ended his Saturday interview with an impromptu performance of “If I Were a Rich Man” from that show.

His appearance at KU raised $30,000 for the KU theater department, but also seemed like a personal thank-you to the audiences, fellow students and teachers who touched him as a student. KU had made a difference in his life.

Touching the lives of individual students is one of KU’s primary missions. Another is to conduct important research. On Monday, KU officials announced that the university would receive the largest single research grant ever awarded to a Kansas university, $19 million from the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund research on the world’s polar ice caps, the rate at which they are melting and the effect that will have around the world.

The research proposal submitted by KU competed against 168 other proposals; two grants were awarded. Nothing more needs to be said about how respected KU’s Prasad Gogineni is in this field. The grant will allow the university to create The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets to further research by Gogineni and his team, which will include seven new researchers, four new faculty positions and 15 graduate students.

As part of the project, KU researchers will work with several other universities, including Haskell Indian Nations University, across the nation and in other countries, as well as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center. The grant ensures that KU is viewed as performing some of the world’s most important research on polar ice caps.

In one weekend, KU officials helped dedicate one of the few “purpose-built,” free-standing humanities centers in the country, and the university was the object of acclaim bestowed by a single former student and the international scientific community. It doesn’t get much better than that.