Heard on the Hill: Basketball broadcaster Gary Bender to do work for KU Alumni, KU Endowment; Cartoon Network invading downtown again; law school applications not just slumping at KU

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

• I spotted that Gary Bender, a longtime sports broadcaster and KU alumnus, will retire from his job as broadcaster for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and will do consulting work with the KU Alumni Association and KU Endowment Association.

So I checked with Jennifer Sanner, senior vice president at the KU Alumni Association, who confirmed it for me.

Bender will be doing various events for the Alumni Association, including serving as emcee for KU Alumni’s Rock Chalk Ball on April 16.

He has done similar things for the alumni association in the past, Sanner said, but now that he has retired and moved to Kansas City, Mo., he will likely be available on a more frequent basis.

In addition to working for the Phoenix Suns, Bender has announced at KU, the Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears, St. Louis Rams and Phoenix Cardinals.

He has broadcast the Final Four, the Masters, Sunday Night Football and national NBA and MLB telecasts.

“He’s got a great voice,” Sanner said.

• Look for the Cartoon Network to again swarm downtown with music and a carnival to promote its Adult Swim programming.

It’s part of the network’s tour of college towns, and Lawrence will again be one of the 10 lucky cities that get to participate.

For those who don’t know much about Adult Swim, it’s cartoon shows geared more toward young college-aged adults in the style of the show “Family Guy.”

And it can be pretty silly.

One of the characters on one of the cartoons, for example, is a giant wad of meat. Its name is “Meatwad.” I say “its” rather than “his” or “her” because its gender, apparently, is “meat,” according to Meatwad’s official biography.

Anyway, like a similar event last year, the Cartoon Network will have music and other carnival-style entertainment on Eighth Street between Massachusetts and New Hampshire streets on April 14. Pusha T is scheduled to perform with DJ Rick Geez.

• An article I wrote today talks about how law school applications are down at KU, as they are across the country.

This Wall Street Journal article talks about the situation nationally.

The article made me wonder if students who would have been applying to KU had similar thoughts, and, as it turned out, it looks like they did.

One interesting thing I noticed from that article was that even in 2009, the American Bar Association had noticed an issue.

“‘The rising cost of a legal education and the realities of the legal job market mean that going to law school may not pay off,’ the ABA said in a 2009 report, which noted that the average law student could expect to graduate with more than $100,000 in school debt,” the WSJ article said.

The student I talked to for the article said she had fears and anxieties about finding a job, and when I wrote about this issue first back in January, I spoke to other students and graduates — many of whom didn’t want to go on the record with their concerns — who felt the same way.

It will be interesting to see how this mindset affects not just KU, but all the nation’s law schools, in the months and years ahead.

• Heard on the Hill: the only place talking about law schools, basketball broadcasters and wads of meat in one place on the Internet today. Keep the good stuff coming by sending me tips at ahyland@ljworld.com.