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

• ‘Tis the season for university rankings, and here’s yet another set of them (courtesy of a magnificent Heard on the Hill tipster) that may pose an interesting challenge for the KU marketing folks.

They’re done by Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and they have a whole host of different rankings. Check them out here. (And here’s KU’s specific page.)

Here’s the challenge for that happy go-lucky marketing guy looking to show how KU rocks. On one hand, KU made a top 25 list that’s really pretty spiffy. KU is No. 17 in the “Future CEOs” list. That’s one below the University of Michigan, and one above the University of Texas-Austin. Pretty good company, right?

But KU also made a second list. It was No. 20 on the “Horniest” colleges list. (UT-Austin beat us on that list, by the way. It’s No. 13). That’s probably not going to make it into any brochures any time soon.

KU also made one other list — ranking 14th in the “Healthiest” schools list.

As I’ve talked about in the past, before you take anything away from these kinds of lists, you should always check out how they came up with the lists in the first place.

Take a peek at how they came up with the “horniest” schools, for example.

“To find the best 25 schools for hookups we used four data points: each college’s score for girls, guys, and campus strictness from College Prowler (a higher campus-strictness score indicates a less-strict campus culture), and the male-female ratio with data from the National Center for Education Statistics, with better scores given to gender egalitarian schools that ensure both genders have a fair shot at a hookup. Each data point was weighted equally, and extra credit was given for schools that landed on Playboy’s best-party-school list for 2011.”

Yes, you got that right. KU nudged higher on the “horniest” schools list just because it enrolls a similar number of men and women to “ensure both genders have a fair shot at a hookup.”

And, looking at the CEO’s list, they examined mostly data from Forbes lists — billionaires got points and CEO’s of Fortune 100 companies got points (thank you Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Kroger CEO David Dillon), along with a few other categories.

But, in looking at KU’s specific rankings, I see that it got credit for exactly zero billionaires. But wait — what about KU alumnus Philip Anchutz, the 124th richest man in the world, who’s worth $7.5 billion?

I guess at the end of the day, I’m not entirely sold on the academic rigor that went into the creation of this stuff. So, I guess it might be a good idea for KU marketing to steer clear of these rankings altogether. Fortunately, I’m bound by no such constraints here at Heard on the Hill World Headquarters at Seventh and New Hampshire streets.

• Though many people were probably glad to see the KU football team score six touchdowns against McNeese State on Saturday, I bet the folks at the KU Libraries were particularly pleased. Because they are, for the second year, participating in a fundraising campaign called the Touchdown Challenge.

Donors are asked to pledge a certain amount of money for each touchdown scored this year.

Last year, the campaign began in the middle of the season. It raised about $5,000, library officials said, but they hope this year will bring even more money with an updated marketing effort and a full year with which to work.

• Now that you’ve recovered from your Labor Day weekend, it’s time once again to break out the KU directory and solicit Heard on the Hill tips directly from a random person on campus. So let’s have it, Peter Joseph Ramler, graduate research assistant in the Bureau of Child Research. Tell me something I don’t already know at ahyland@ljworld.com.