Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• So you may have heard a bit about a bunch of newsletters from Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s past with some incendiary racist rhetoric that’s caused a bit of a stir on the national political scene.

Paul has said he didn’t write them and doesn’t agree with their content. This whole kerfuffle (I’m going to try to work that word into each Heard on the Hill this week) gets rehashed whenever the Texas congressman decides to run for president.

This mostly traces its roots to this 2008 story in The New Republic, which dug up some old documents.

Here’s a new story from the Atlantic that ran last week on the issue.

What’s kind of interesting, at least to me, is that the New Republic found a lot of those old newsletters sitting in Spencer Research Library here at KU and others at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The letters at KU are part of the Wilcox Collection, which is one of the country’s biggest collections of extreme left-wing and right-wing American literature. The KU library has a Web page devoted to Paul and the story.

• Here’s a quick update on a story featuring KU researchers getting publicly censured for plagiarism that got a lot of interest when I originally published it back in October.

This has been a little difficult to follow because KU won’t say anything beyond the public censure notification here and here.

And Gerald Lushington, the faculty member who talked to me initially, has been advised not to make any further comments to the media, according to this article in the University Daily Kansan.

But the case made it onto the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Ticker blog last week. That’s because the case made it into the Federal Register, a sort of compendium of public notices issued by the federal government.

That tells us a little more about the penalties Lushington will face from the Department of Health and Human Services for engaging in research misconduct on projects supported by National Institutes of Health money.

The item in the Federal Register summarizes a bit about the plagiarism. One paper involved greater than half of the material being lifted from another source. Others involved a paragraph or slightly more or slightly less.

It said Lushington had entered a voluntary settlement agreement and agreed to submit to research supervision for two years verifying that his work is his own and removing himself from serving as an adviser to the Public Health Service, among other punishments.

• Six KU faculty members will receive fellowships from the Hall Center for the Humanities. The fellows receive a semester’s release from teaching, an office in the Hall Center and a small research stipend.

Four faculty — Jonathan Earle, Roberta Pergher, Kathryn Rhine and Ann Wierda Rowland — were selected as research fellows. Stanley Lombardo and Forrest Pierce received Creative Work Fellowships.

Earle, an associate professor of history, will work on his book, “Electing Abraham Lincoln: The Revolution of 1860.”

Pergher, an assistant professor of history, will work on her book, “Fascist Borderlands: Nation, Empire and Italy’s Settlement Program, 1922-1943.”

Rhine, assistant professor of anthropology, will work on her book, “The Unseen Things: HIV, Secrecy and Wellbeing Among Women in Nigeria.”

Rowland, an associate professor of English, has a book to work on, too, called “Keats in America,” looking at how American culture and trans-Atlantic exchanges have formed the reputation of the English poet.

The Hall Center decided to award two Creative Work Fellowships, an unusual decision that’s a reflection of the strong applicant pool.

Lombardo, a professor of classics whose translation of “The Iliad” I read in my Western Civ class at KU, is working on a new translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” along with his already published translation of “Inferno.”

Pierce, an assistant professor of music, is working on “Il Cantico del Sol,” a 10-movement cycle for unaccompanied choir.

Good stuff.

• I’m going to start awarding Heard on the Hill fellowships, I think, to people who submit the best tips to ahyland@ljworld.com. Unlike the Hall Center, I can’t relieve you of your teaching responsibilities, but I can offer some mad props. That’s probably not as cool, though.