Heard on the Hill: Recently retired KU architect Warren Corman to serve as homecoming grand marshal; ESU president to return to faculty post; KU business dean finalist ends up at KSU

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

• The KU Homecoming Committee has announced that recently retired architect Warren Corman will serve as the 2011 Grand Marshal for the annual homecoming parade.

The parade is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 1, this year, with the regularly scheduled whole slate of homecoming activities for the week before.

Corman worked as chief architect for the Kansas Board of Regents from 1966 to 1997. After that he was named university architect at KU and special assistant to Chancellor Robert Hemenway.

He retired from his 63-year architecture career in December.

• A little off the hill, but here’s a brief update on last week’s news that Emporia State University President Michael Lane would be stepping down.

ESU announced on Friday (the day after Lane announced his resignation) that he would be taking a position as an accounting faculty member.

The Kansas Board of Regents will likely move quickly to appoint an interim president and a search committee to find a new leader.

Lane’s resignation creates the fourth university CEO vacancy among the six regents universities in Kansas since 2009, with relatively new leaders in place at KU, Kansas State and Pittsburg State.

The leaders of the other two universities have both exceeded the average tenure for university leaders these days (a little over five years or so) by a good margin.

Don Beggs has been the president of Wichita State since 1999, and Ed Hammond has led Fort Hays State since 1987.

• Here’s a fun tidbit that illustrates the whirlwind that can surround higher education leadership positions.

Kansas State University — like KU — just named a new business dean. Their choice? Ali Malekzadeh, dean of the Williams College of Business at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

If his name sounds a little familiar, that might be because he was a finalist in KU’s search for a new dean, too.

KU chose Neeli Bendapudi, who had been a professor of marketing at Ohio State University.

Malekzadeh will start at KSU in July, and Bendapudi will be here in August. I’m thinking we should organize some kind of Ohio dean-off to determine which one is doing better. I wonder what the best way to do that would be…

• I take Heard on the Hill tips from all comers, even if you’re not a dean of business from the state of Ohio. Just send an email to ahyland@ljworld.com.