Your 7-11 daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.
• In talking with KU alumnus and donor David Booth about plans for displaying Naismith’s rules of basketball, we also discussed another topic, too.
Namely, we discussed an employee of his at Dimensional Fund Advisors in Austin, Texas, who goes by Todd Reesing.
Yes, the former star Jayhawk quarterback now works on client relations for Booth’s company. After his KU career, Reesing was looking to move back to Austin, Booth said, and the two got connected through John Hadl, another former football star who now works at Kansas Athletics.
Reesing “is going to be a star” at the company, too, and has done great work so far. Booth said that, pound-for-pound, he’d never seen a better KU quarterback. I asked if he wished Reesing had any eligibility left.
“Absolutely,” Booth replied. “Don’t you?”
• Here’s a lengthy exit interview in the New York Times with Sheila Bair, the outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a KU alumna.
It’s a wide-ranging discussion and covers a lot of ground.
“They should have let Bear Stearns fail,” she says right away from the opening paragraph of the interview.
Bair had a front-row seat for much of the economic collapse.
“Since the law passed, she has made an immense effort to convince Wall Street and the country that the nation’s giant banks — the same ones that required bailouts in 2008 and became known as “too big to fail” institutions — will never again be bailed out, thanks in part to new powers at the F.D.I.C.,” the article points out.
Interesting stuff.
• Before we leave the topic of KU granting honorary degrees completely, I wanted to pass along some feedback I received from reader Gayle Matchett.
“As a student in 1955, I learned that KU gave no honorary degrees out of respect of the hard work of its graduates,” she writes. “If you have a degree from KU, you earned it.”
She and her husband, a former KU faculty member, were proud of KU’s ability not to follow the crowd.
“And another part of KU in which I once felt pride, will be gone,” she wrote.
• David Booth was right. I do wish Todd Reesing had more eligibility left. But absent that, I’ll just wish for more tips for Heard on the Hill. Keep sending them to ahyland@ljworld.com.