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

• The KU School of Law will play host to a lawyer who had a front row seat to several key civil rights battles during the last few decades.

Accomplished civil rights attorney and Columbia Law School professor Jack Greenberg will speak at KU next week.

Greenberg is scheduled to deliver a Living History Lecture at 4 p.m. July 28 in 107 Green Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

He assisted Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case, one of 40 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

He also is a founding member of Human Rights Watch and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

• Here’s another KU professor in the news this week. Political science professor Donald Haider-Markel got a mention in the USA Today in an article about openly gay and bisexual politicians running for office. They called him probably because of his new book on the subject, “Out and Running.”

Haider-Markel found a clear connection between the number of members of the LGBT community in state legislatures and the number of pro-LGBT bills introduced and adopted.

Gay legislators, he said, can push those issues to the forefront.

“”It helps push these issues forward,” Haider-Markel told the newspaper. “There’s also the role-model aspect of having legislators see openly gay and lesbian legislators in their mix, and basically seeing that they’re just like them. It makes it hard to frame or portray gays and lesbians as really bizarre human forms that don’t look anything like us when legislators are introducing their partners of 20 years and talking about their relationships and their adopted children.”

• Leo Morton, the chancellor of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, was in Washington this week arguing for the benefits of Pell Grants.

As I’ve mentioned before in this space, for every $100 that the maximum award is raised, that means an additional 130,000 students take advantage of the program, according to the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

And Morton said that he estimated about 10 percent of his total tuition revenue came from students who were on Pell Grants.

But the program is having an effect on the federal budget, according to this blog post from Education Week, which says it is running at an $11 billion deficit.

Morton isn’t the only college leader in Washington this week trying to protect the Pell Grants, which could be facing cuts as part of any budget deal. I’ll be sure to keep watching.

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