Your first day of class dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• Welcome back, everyone. It’s not been the same without you.

Lots of stuff going on, but here’s one new thing I spotted, courtesy of a sweet tipster. This Friday, organizers are planning a Campus Art Walk, something they hope becomes an annual event.

The event is scheduled from 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, and is set for multiple venues, with multiple different forms of media, including 2D and 3D art, digital art and dance and musical performances.

Here’s a brochure with the complete information.

A “procession of mobile art galleries” is also scheduled to be “worn/carried/pushed/pulled/ridden,” as it was explained to me, from the Helen Foresman Spencer Art Museum to Ninth and Massachusetts downtown at 6 p.m.

The event will coincide with the Final Fridays art walk also scheduled for Friday.

• Here’s a nice blog post detailing some of the activity at KU Hillel over the past 10 years under the leadership of director Jay Lewis.

They’ve moved from a house on Mississippi Street to a new space at 722 N.H. (near Heard on the Hill World Headquarters at Seventh and New Hampshire, where I can keep a close eye on them).

The staff has grown from three to five, and the organization has grown from “a handful” of students to 250 active members today. Its budget has more than tripled in that time.

They estimate that about 1,800 Jewish students attend KU.

There’s a lot more information at the blog post, too.

• One interesting thing that came out of some sweet tipsters giving me more information about faculty movements was this blog that tracks faculty movement in philosophy departments across the country.

And perhaps even more interesting was a link to this ranking of graduate philosophy programs around the country.

Rankings are always a tricky business, and this appears to be done by a University of Chicago professor with some input from others around the country.

But people in philosophy apparently check it out (a faculty member showed it to me).

KU didn’t crack the top 50 in the rankings, but it’s an interesting thing to watch. I’d be curious to know if there are other similar rankings like this out there for other programs, so please let me know if you know of any.

• If there were a ranking of news websites’ daily compilations of news, notes and links from around Kansas University, I bet Heard on the Hill would be No. 1 every year. If you’d like to get a line in my acceptance speech, though, you’ll have to submit a tip to ahyland@ljworld.com.