Annie Waldman and David Armstrong of ProPublica, in a [background story for the *Chronicle*](https://www.chronicle.com/article/Many-Public-Universities/247667) about their new ["Dollars for Profs" conflict of interest database](https://projects.propublica.org/dollars-for-profs/):
> Even as universities—both public and private—have stepped up their internal-reporting requirements over the past two decades, many public institutions have codified faculty disclosures as private information, making it almost impossible for the public to access the records. More than a third of the nearly 30 state universities that rejected our public-records requests cited personnel-privacy laws...
Why not a public disclosure requirement for any institution that accepts Federal funds (all U.S. universities and colleges, in other words)? The coercive power of the Federal funding lever has been abused, or used for bad ends, unquestionably. But here's a way to pry open patchwork state and university policies, with a crucial end in mind: to shore up, in effect, the integrity of academic research.