On Friday Chancellor Douglas A. Girod sent a message to faculty and staff about KU’s financial challenges in the coming fiscal year and shared a video presentation in which Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWitt summarized KU’s budget strategies. 

Key takeaways included:

In his message, Girod noted that by acting now, KU is positioned to act strategically while limiting the impact on core functions. More budget details can be found in the Annual Financial Plan 2025 PowerPoint. 

Four faculty members have been awarded a KU Keeler Family Intra-University Professorship, which was established in the early 1980s to support faculty in their pursuit of collaboration across disciplines.

The 2025-2026 Keeler Professorship recipients are:

The Keeler Professorships provide tenured faculty the opportunity to strengthen their knowledge of an academic specialty, broaden or achieve greater depth in a defined field of scholarship, or gain competence in a new area of scholarly endeavor. As part of this award, Keeler recipients will present their research at a spring Red Hot Research event, a cross-disciplinary event series hosted by The Commons that highlights collaborative KU research partnerships. 

Read more about the recipients and their proposed projects on the KU News website. 

Eligible employees will have Thursday as a paid day off to commemorate Juneteenth. Classes will not be in session, and the university will be closed. 

For most eligible employees, the holiday will already be loaded on timesheets with no further action needed. Eligible employees required to work the holiday should follow these instructions to report their time:  

Additional information for recording time and absences can be found online at Human Resources’ Guide to Time and Absence Reporting(.docx). 

This spring “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” by John Green, was announced as the 2025-2026 KU Reads: A Common Book Experience selection. Faculty and staff who are considering teaching the book in the fall or next spring, or developing related programming for students, may request a copy via a webform.  

Teaching materials and ideas for curricular adoption are available on the KU Reads website, in addition to upcoming KU Reads programming. Student copies of the book will be available in August. 

On Thursday Naismith Drive’s northbound lanes will be closed from 18th Street to Sunnyside Avenue. Traffic will be detoured on to westbound 18th Street, along Irving Hill Road and then connect back to Naismith Drive.

The City of Lawrence will be lining sewer pipes. The closure is expected to last for one day. The southbound lanes will remain open. For the latest on road and parking lot construction projects, visit the Construction Information and Closures webpage. 

On June 24, KU IT will implement a change that adds extra protection against denial-of-service attacks to the KU network by limiting rapid, repeated connection attempts from external sources. 

Most students, faculty and staff will not notice any impact. The change only affects connections that are initiated from outside the KU network and target internal systems. Normal internet use and connections initiated from within KU, including browsing websites or accessing systems inside or outside KU, will not be affected. 

Researchers or others who rely on high-volume external connections may notice some changes. If this update may affect your work, contact your IT support staff or email IT security at itsec@ku.edu. 

MyTalent will be down for scheduled maintenance from 7 to 8 a.m. Thursday. The system will not be accessible during this time. For questions or assistance, contact your IT support staff.

The next Science on Tap will feature Greg Troiani, a physics and astronomy doctoral student, who will explain how KU researchers are using the James Webb Space Telescope to explore the link between galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centers. 

The event will be held from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. June 25 in the beer hall area at Free State Brewing Company. The presentation is free and open to the public.  

This spring during the University Research Awards ceremony, Chancellor Doug Girod celebrated some of KU's most outstanding researchers and their impact.

Jennifer Raff, associate professor of anthropology, received a University Scholarly Achievement Award. In the video above, Raff talks about her research on ancient DNA and her work with indigenous communities to use DNA to better understand their histories. 

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