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

• One year ago today, Adam Buhler was in Jacmel, Haiti, watching the roof of a church topple near his hotel as the massive earthquake struck the nation.

My interview with Adam and his wife, Karen, who were both KU students at the time, stuck out in my mind for several reasons.

They were stranded in the country for days, and were only able to communicate with their families in brief spurts, when they could secure Internet or phone connectivity.

I remember Adam’s shock after I delivered the news that Conan O’Brien was leaving the “Tonight Show” — he’d missed the announcement while trying to figure out how to get back home.

But what I really remember was their dedication to the area, where Adam first visited on a mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“We’ll go back,” Adam told me, still weary on the day he returned home from the rubble. “We were planning on going on future trips before. Even more so now.”

One year later, he’s already made good on that promise, his mother, Lawrence resident Beth Buhler, told me.

In fact, he’s there now, working with a few other photojournalists on the Nap Kenbe Project, which is an effort to witness and document the rebuilding efforts of the nation that continue today.

He’ll be taking photographs and video of the efforts in the hopes of producing a documentary that can be submitted to the Sundance Film festival.

Adam did point out that he was at least warmer — today’s high temperature is expected to reach the upper 80s.

• I spent a good chunk of my day Tuesday in Westwood for the KU Hospital Authority Board’s meeting. Those occur six times a year, and I typically pop by to see if any news can be gleaned from them.

Much of the time, the meetings are pretty mundane. At least the parts that I can see. That’s because the meetings operate under a strange sort of situation under state open meetings law.

The state gets to choose some of the members of KU Hospital’s authority board –13 of the board’s 19 members are nominated by the governor and approved by the Kansas Senate. The remaining six spots are ex officio voting members filled by specific positions — KU’s chancellor always has a seat, no matter which person is filling the role, for example.

And, the board’s meetings are open to the public — at least, to a point.

The hospital closes much of the meetings under an exemption that allows it to deem most matters of a proprietary nature that would hurt the hospital’s competitive advantage.

And the hospital doesn’t use state funds, so they get a pretty wide leeway to close their financial matters to the public.

So the board typically spends a few minutes in open session talking about a few positive things — the success story of KU Hospital has been well-documented here and elsewhere — and then retreat into closed session to talk about everything else.

I mention all this because I nearly caught them Tuesday — an “executive compensation committee” report was listed as being voted on in open session later in the afternoon. (One easy way to get a reporter’s attention is to utter the words “executive compensation.”)

So I asked about it during the board’s lunch break, knowing that if a document is discussed in open session in an open meeting, I’m entitled by law to look at a copy of it.

I was told that it was proprietary, and when I asked to see it anyway, citing what I knew about the law, the board’s attorneys got involved. After that brief discussion, I was told that a “clerical error” had been made, and that the items would be discussed and voted on in closed session after all, which they were.

It was kind of like a little chess game, and I lost. My lesson? Next time I see something like that, make sure it gets talked about in open session before I bring it to someone’s attention…

• Just two days after President Obama is scheduled to deliver this year’s State of the Union address, KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little will deliver her own “State of the University” address.

It’s set for 4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 27, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The speech will be streamed live at chancellor.ku.edu.

I don’t remember last year’s version of this speech — if it even happened at all — but here’s hoping this one will be thrilling and engaging. Regardless of whether it is or it isn’t, I’ll be there to find out. If you see me there, be sure to stop and say hello.

• There seem to be an awful lot of “State of the X” sort of speeches floating around these days. Maybe I ought to stand on the steps of the Journal-World News Center in downtown Lawrence and do a “State of Heard on the Hill” sort of speech. It’ll be a better speech if you send me a tip for Heard on the Hill at ahyland@ljworld.com.