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

• KU Parking made a grand entrance on Twitter on Thursday (you can follow them here).

“This ought to be good,” a tipster wrote to me. “As if KU Parking doesn’t get enough complaints without opening up a social media outlet with no restraints other than 140 characters. I hope people remember to give them some praise for a job well done, too.”

The first tweet from them said they were soliciting questions, concerns or complaints.

They got a few of those (along at least one obscenity that I saw).

Someone suggested repaving the surface lot between Allen Fieldhouse and the engineering complex.

“Yes, that is on our list of places to repave someday,” came the response.

Another person asked how to “keep my Union tag from messing up the system when I park in the other garage?”

The answer? Just hide your permit from the sensor — “on the floor, behind your back, etc.” — when approaching the gate at the opposite garage.

Lots of people like to bend my ear about their various parking issues. I wonder if this effort will help quell some of that deluge that I’m sure the parking folks deal with on a regular basis.

• I’ve been watching lots of discussion on President Barack Obama’s student loan plan unveiled this week.

In a nutshell, the plan lowers the cap on loan payment to a maximum of 10 percent of discretionary income, down from 15 percent. It also forgives debt after 20 years, as opposed to the previous program, which forgave debt after 25 years.

It’s not the complete forgiveness that some have asked for, and some, like Jeff Selingo of the Chronicle of Higher Education, have said “it’s not going to make a huge difference.”

“Between both programs, it’s probably going to impact maybe about seven million of those people in repayment or new students coming into the program,” Selingo said on PBS NewsHour. “The thing about the income-based program that was announced today is that it’s only going to affect students in college right now.

“So all of these students, these recent college grads who have graduated with a lot of debt who are now looking for jobs and can’t find them or are doing jobs that only require a high school diploma, it’s not going to provide much help to them.”

One item in particular I’ve noticed about the plan. People with private loans — which have far less flexibility than government-backed ones — won’t be able to take advantage of the new provisions in Obama’s plan, as outlined here.

I’ve written a good deal on student debt, which will rise to more than $1 trillion in outstanding loans this year, according to USA Today. Scary stuff.

• Though Missouri may well be on the way out of the Big 12 Conference, some KU folks are keeping the border war alive in the academic sort of conference.

Scheduled from Nov. 10-Nov.12 at the Kansas City Public Library, 17 scholars of the Civil War-era conflicts in Kansas and Missouri will deliver a series of talks and presentations.

Jonathan Earle, a history professor at KU, will deliver, “If I Went West, I Think I Would Go To Kansas”: Abraham Lincoln, the Sunflower State, and the Election of 1860, at 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 11 at the Plaza Branch of the library, 4801 Main St.

And KU history professor Jennifer Weber will deliver “William Quantrill Is My Homeboy,” or “The Border Wars Go to College,” at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 12 at the same spot.

• William Quantrill isn’t my homeboy — that’s for sure — but if he sent a tip for Heard on the Hill to ahyland@ljworld.com, I’d sure appreciate it, just as I do for everyone else.