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

• Every year around this time, I always try to bring up these rather spiffy-looking pumpkin KU stencils that you can print off from their website, in case you’re trying to create some kind of Jack-O-Jay. (OK, maybe I just wanted to say “Jack-O-Jay,” which really seems to roll right off the tongue).

KU gets a nice mention on the blog Mashable for how it’s using its Facebook page because of the links to all kinds of stuff, including the pumpkin stencils.

• Here’s some Heard on the Hill mad props to KU journalism associate professor Doug Ward, who has been named as the 2011-12 Budig Teaching Professor of Writing in the School of Journalism.

The award is named for Gene Budig, a former chancellor of the university.

I was speaking with Budig recently, and he told me he has established eight such awards all over the university, including in School of Education, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and, most recently, in the KU Libraries, to name a few.

Ward is an associate professor in the school and teaches editing classes.

This particular award is shared by the schools of journalism and education.

Next spring, he will give a lecture on the importance of writing. The time and date for the lecture have not yet been set.

• Educator and activist Tony Porter will deliver the latest lecture in the Jana Mackey Distinguished Lecture Series, a series in memory of Jana Lynne Mackey, a law student who advocated for women’s rights before she was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 2008.

Porter will be the fourth speaker in the series, and he will deliver the lecture, “Real Men, Real Talk.”

He is working with numerous domestic and sexual violence programs, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and colleges and universities from all over the nation.

He will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. His speech is free and open to the public.

• If you send me a tip for Heard on the Hill to ahyland@ljworld.com, I’ll send you the untried, untested official Heard on the Hill pumpkin stencil. You’ll have to tell me how it works.