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

• Particularly if you’re a parent of a KU student, you’ve probably noticed that spring classes haven’t started up yet.

In fact, they won’t begin until Friday.

A guest columnist at the Kansas City Star surmised that perhaps Lew Perkins or “that BP guy” was to blame for the long, five-week break.

Don’t look for the lengthy breaks to stop any time soon. The Kansas Board of Regents has approved an academic calendar with four fewer class days per year.

What will change, however, is the standard time for the spring semester to begin: the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Day.

George Bittlingmayer, a distinguished professor of business who is a former chairman of KU’s calendar committee, said one of the benefits to a calendar like the one his committee recommended (with fewer academic days) is that these kinds of one-day weeks, with classes only on Friday, can be eliminated.

The late start also can have its benefits, he said, including allowing for longer study abroad trips. He mentioned one faculty colleague, recently returning from India, would have a few days to shake off the jet lag before stepping back into the classroom.

He also mentioned something that I found to be true when I watched the calendar committee in action about a year ago: There are a number of interested parties that all have something to say about the academic calendar.

Faculty, students and administrators can pull the committee in one direction or the other, it seemed to me. I remember quite the dust-up when stop day seemed to be threatened for awhile (it was preserved, eventually).

So it’s a bit of a thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it.

• I spotted a rather interesting reason to raise tuition from our friends across the border at the University of Missouri.

Operating under the logic that students and parents would equate a higher price tag with higher academic excellence, it was possible that more students could see MU as a prestigious school with the increased tuition, members of Missouri Board of Curators said, according to the Associated Press.

That’s a new one on me, for sure.

The exact increase still isn’t known.

The Kansas City-area media blog Bottom Line Communications (where I saw this story first) suggested that perhaps Missouri should double or triple tuition to match Ivy League schools.

• And speaking of tuition, University of Colorado senior Nic Ramos made some waves nationally when he decided to pay his more than $14,000 tuition bill by using more than 30 pounds of $1 bills.

He said he wanted to draw attention to the rising costs of tuition — that $14,000-plus paid for one semester of tuition, he said.

At KU, the Sacramento, Calif., resident would have had a lighter load of bills to haul around — just $10,340.25 per semester, according to KU’s one-stop shopping tuition website.

• The Heard on the Hill academic calendar lasts all year long. Help me learn by telling me something I don’t already know at ahyland@ljworld.com.