Unt Stops Naming Its Donors

[NT80]

UNT stops naming its donors

Reports list only categories of gift givers; officials say privacy reason for change

11:17 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 5, 2007

By Matthew Zabel / Staff Writer

Donors to the University of North Texas now can hold onto their privacy.

Citing the importance of protecting donors’ identities, university leaders are no longer going to reveal donors’ names as they have been in quarterly reports to the Board of Regents.

“With today’s concerns about confidentiality, we felt it was better to not have that information public,” said Gayle Strange, chairwoman of the Board of Regents. “We’re willing to try it this way and see how it works.”

Until last month, university leaders made public a quarterly report listing each donor who gave $3,000 or more, either to UNT or to its private foundation.

Occasionally, a donor was listed as anonymous.

Then, UNT leaders changed course when their August report to the regents included only a summary of how much money came from individuals, foundations, companies, institutions and bequests. A separate category gave the total of gifts that were $3,000 or less.

Strange said the categories of givers are more important to the board than the individual names, and the university would still find ways to recognize donors when it is appropriate, as long as the donor does not object.

Greg McQueen, UNT’s senior vice president for advancement, said more and more donors want to remain private, and the university should either seek permission to release each name or stop the practice altogether.

“We’ve never had a problem with it, but it’s not in the best interest of donors to list their names,” McQueen said. “I’m sure we didn’t get each one’s permission to do so.”

McQueen said that if his department publishes donors’ names in other publications, they would be listed under categories of money, such as $10,000 to $20,000, rather than a listing showing the exact amount of each gift.

A 2003 amendment to the state open-records law allows public universities to withhold the identity of donors unless the donor is a governmental body.

Because the UNT Foundation is private and separate from the university, the law never required it to disclose its donors.

Bill Aleshire, an Austin lawyer with the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said just because the law allows a university to keep donors’ names secret doesn’t mean the university should.

“Universities, like every government agency, ought to make information open to the public unless they’ve got a darn good reason not to,” Aleshire said.

If the university is going to lose a gift by making the donor’s name public, then it should invoke the exception of the law, he said.

April, May and June were significant months for UNT fundraising as the university and its foundation took in more than $12 million, most of which came via the UNT Foundation.

Of that, more than $10 million came from other private foundations, according to the August report.

In 2006, the university and the UNT Foundation reported raising a combined $2 million over the same three-month period.

McQueen said UNT’s endowment has increased to $91 million.

Ken Murphy, a UNT alumnus and the namesake of the university’s Murphy Enterprise Center, said being listed as a donor never bothered him much, but he did receive more solicitation phone calls because of it.

It is a decision, he said, that should be between the donor and the university.

Some people would like to be recognized when they give; others want to avoid the solicitation letters and phone calls that follow after they are identified as a donor, he said.

“I would prefer they didn’t tell who gives,” Murphy said. “People get that list, and then they start to call. Everybody wants you to help. There’s just only so much you can help on.”