Freedom of information is under siege. In the wake of the Enron scandals, corporations still oppose demands to fully disclose their grant making. Crafty congressmen are circumventing campaign-finance regulations by using charities as vehicles for donors to purchase influence without having to reveal the donors' identities or the specific gifts and benefits to the politicians. More recently, federal agencies like the Treasury Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Archives and Records Administration have used the Patriot Act and antiterrorism fears to restrict access to significant amounts of information with questionable relevance to the nation's security.

The extent to which public institutions should be allowed to hide in the shade is an issue that is relevant to higher education. Increasingly, questions are arising about whether the public has a right to know the financial aspects of the "independent" fund-raising foundations connected to state universities. In past months, courts in Iowa, Kentucky, and other states have issued different decisions on the matter, with several judges in Kentucky ruling that a foundation must reveal its donors, and one in Iowa allowing a foundation to keep its records private.

The appropriate response, however, should be clear-cut. Especially at a time when public universities are experiencing major financial challenges -- and, as a result, raising tuition significantly -- withholding such information could have deleterious effects on the institutions and the people who attend and support them.

There are important reasons to pierce the veil between public universities and their nonprofit fund-raising arms, including:

The foundations' public status. Who calls the shots on university foundations? The state university, of course. The foundations fit the three standards of Statement 39 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's statement on the subject: The university foundation exists for the direct benefit of the state university and its constituents; the state university has access to the economic resources acquired or controlled by the foundation; and the foundation's resources are significant to the state university. Regardless of the specifics of their staffing, management, and office location, the foundations operate as fund-raising and investment departments of public universities.

The demographics of higher-education donors. The Iowa and Kentucky cases focused on demands for public access to the names of donors to the university foundations. The emotional response to "donor" is the image of an individual check writer or some working person making regular charitable deductions from their paychecks. But we're not talking about nonitemizers here. Many of the donors to university foundations are making big gifts and expecting a lot in return -- and the universities are responding.

When the family of Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, gave $300-million to the University of Arkansas, it allegedly requested that John A. White remain as chancellor of the Fayetteville campus for five years. What other conditions did the Waltons demand for what was the largest grant ever to an American public university? The court protected the public from learning that. Yet a gift of such magnitude to a public university is not just a run-of-the-mill donation. In general it comes with strings, lots of them. Arkansans have a right to know what their state university gave in return.

It is also difficult to imagine that U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, fought to keep the names of donors to a center for political leadership at the University of Louisville under wraps simply because of concerns about donor privacy and the fund-raising competitiveness of the university's foundation. Perhaps the donors' contributions might be related to currying favor with an extremely powerful senator, bypassing campaign-finance requirements for divulging contributors' identities, even potentially those of corporations with legislative or regulatory issues pending before the Senate. It is in the university's and the foundation's best interest to avoid the appearance of being used by the Senate's most strident opponent of campaign-finance reform as a means of sidestepping campaign-finance disclosure.

The corporatization of higher education. As alumni giving to higher education dips because of the troubled economy, the role of corporate givers increasingly takes center stage. Some 10 to 17 percent of corporate giving goes to colleges -- and the donors expect strategic commitments in return. Some corporations may be simply seeking naming rights and ribbon cuttings, but others may have agendas that involve marketing deals, the selection of tenured professors, and even the political content of courses. If anyone remains under the impression that corporations do not have any bottom-line strategic interests in mind when they make grants, it's time to catch up to the latest in corporate philanthropic practice. Public universities are even emulating their corporate donors in their defense against public disclosure, citing "competitive advantage" to justify withholding information about their donors, just as corporations cite it to keep the particulars of their bids for government contracts secret.

As the Enron and Tyco scandals revealed, sometimes corporations make charitable donations through individuals, like corporate officers and directors. If university foundations can prevent such disclosure, corporate efforts to influence public universities through charitable gifts will be able to proceed without effective scrutiny. Since corporations do not have to reveal those gifts in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the public should be able to have other means of learning what corporations are doing to their state institutions.

Consumer impact. University commitments to individual donors are all but guaranteed to have implications for taxpayers and tuition payers alike. Take the reported $35-million offer of T. Denny Sanford to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities to help build a new stadium. Through public-access requests by local newspapers, the less-than-modest stipulations of Sanford's gift were revealed, including extensive naming rights and control of other aspects of the stadium, including its financing.

Although Sanford maintained that he wanted the stadium paid for primarily by private money, and he has since rescinded the pledge, the conditions, if accepted by the university at face value, would have meant substituting the stadium for other important expenditures, increased fund raising to meet any matching or additional requirements, and perhaps even new costs laid on students who have already absorbed various fee increases to pay for other university improvements. Students, parents, and taxpayers have a right to know what they will probably end up financially supporting -- and the alternative programs that they won't be able to support -- because of a donor's demands.

Public accountability. State universities argue that their institutionally related foundations are nonprofit organizations that meet the letter of the law -- and isn't that enough? No, because meeting the minimum does not mean that university foundations are immune from misusing resources. It was not illegal for the University of Minnesota's foundation to award hefty bonuses to its fund raisers for the success of "Campaign Minnesota." But after a 15-percent cut in state support to the university, and in the wake of universitywide tuition hikes and the layoffs of 500 employees, reports of the performance-incentive payments prompted the public release of the information and the decision of the foundation's top officers to forgo half of their six-figure emoluments. Or take the revelations in last year's legislative audit of the University of Tennessee System, which found that the president, John W. Shumaker, had made questionable use of institutional funds for entertainment and even political contributions. The University of Tennessee Foundation had provided a third of his more than $700,000 annual compensation, in the form of country-club dues, a $25,000 expense account, life-insurance premiums, legal services, and other perks. Since Shumaker's resignation under pressure, the foundation has detailed the amounts that it had provided to him, but such cases make it clear that the public identity of university foundations should require greater accountability before problems arise.

One can debate the extent to which access-to-information laws should cover nonprofit entities. But for quasi-public groups like state-university foundations, secrecy should be resisted. It isn't a question of widespread wrongdoing, but of the importance of preventing public agencies like state universities from circumventing the purpose of public-access laws. For watchdogs, for the news media, and for the public, the 1914 observation of the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis still applies: "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is ... the best of disinfectants."

Public disclosure does not guarantee good government, sound university management, or appropriate behavior by nonprofit groups. There is always the potential for people to use information in a bad way. But that concern should not undermine a democratic society's need for access and disclosure. Nonprofit foundations that raise money for their universities should not be insulated from one of democracy's most important tenets, the public's right to information about public institutions.

Rick Cohen is executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.