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

• This one snuck by me earlier this year, but I figured it out pretty quickly when I placed a call to my usual go-to source for all-things-international-students for a story about international students and the NCAA basketball tournament.

Sadly, I was told that Joe Potts, the director of International Student and Scholar Services, had left KU to become associate dean of international programs and director of International Student and Scholars at Purdue University.

He always had a good handle on international students, and was good for a smart take on a wide variety of topics, many of them much more complicated than basketball.

Here are a few quick tributes that some of the people he worked with left for him.

• And, oh yes, classes at Kentucky will be proceeding along as scheduled should that team win the national title, reports the student newspaper.

KU’s chancellor made a similar announcement recently.

Kentucky’s announcement did come with the usual admonishments to behave, with the additional admonishment to not set couches on fire.

Really.

“Keith Jackson, interim chief of the Division of Fire, wants people to refrain from setting fires this year,” the newspaper reported.

Thankfully, that’s a problem we’ve yet to encounter here.

• And because a lot of people have been seemingly looking past this weekend’s games to the championship on Monday, I’d just like to point out that I sure hope the team doesn’t lose.

Losing is certainly no fun, as shown in this Wall Street Journal article about how the NCAA tournament brings about its fair share of crying from folks who normally wouldn’t.

And, yes, former KU Coach Roy Williams, who rather famously tends to cry after his teams are eliminated, is mentioned.

He actually tried to “talk himself out of crying” when he was at KU, the article points out.

“But it was not me,” Williams wrote in his 2009 memoir “Hard Work”. “I just can’t help it.”

• Heard on the Hill would also like people to refrain from setting fires this year. Use all that pent-up energy to send me a tip at ahyland@ljworld.com.