I’ve long suspected the University of Kansas has a Department of Departments somewhere, I just haven’t found it yet. Maybe budget cuts have forced the department to leave its public affairs position unfilled, so there’s no one to contact me with news tips or press releases about what they are doing?

That was a joke — I think.

It turns out KU does actually have a policy on policies. At least that’s what university faculty and staff leaders are calling the University Policy Program, a policy of the KU Policy Office. The policy’s stated purpose is “to align operations and set expectations across the institution regarding the development and promulgation of policies.”

Professor of history and Faculty Senate representative Jonathan Clark voiced concerns at a recent University Senate meeting about the 2014 policy, which was updated earlier this month. Clark called it “a totally top-down” effort and “another example” of major policy not going through University Governance. “I have no confidence in this system working,” he said.

University Senate Executive Committee members last week did discuss asking that the University Senate president be advised of any universitywide policy prior to its enactment, but decided that could become too overwhelming. For now the committee isn’t taking action regarding the policy on policies; they tabled the discussion for a future meeting.

• Cowboy ‘love triangle’ on stage: Almost certainly more gripping than policies about higher education policy is a play running right now at KU — specifically, according to a KU School of the Arts communications coordinator, “a dark comedy centered around a love triangle that is complicated by standards of gender and sex, as well as expectations of heterosexual marriage roles.”

The last two performances of “Late, A Cowboy Song,” by playwright Sarah Rule, are set for 7:30 p.m. today (Wednesday) and Thursday  in the William Inge Memorial Theatre at Murphy Hall. For ticket information and more on the play, visit kutheatre.com/late-cowboy-song.

• Emmett Till expert in national spotlight: KU associate professor of communication studies Dave Tell, one of the leaders of the digital Emmett Till Memory Project, appeared in national news this week after social media sparked renewed interest in replacing at least one Emmett Till site marker in the Mississippi Delta, which has been riddled with bullet holes for years.

The New York Times, for one, interviewed Tell, who is writing a book about Emmett Till and helped develop an app to commemorate the circumstances surrounding the black teenager’s 1955 killing. [Here’s a story we did last year about Tell’s work][5] on the app.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.

[4]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/in-mississippi-struggling-for-an-emmett-till-memorial-that-withstands-gunshots.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=2