A tip about alleged phony courses for athletes at Auburn University was lodged anonymously at the university’s 24-hour fraud hotline. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a growing number of campuses are installing such hotlines to encourage employees to come forward about a range of wrong-doing, including criminal activity, conflict-of-interest incidents, and time-sheet abuse.

A director of EthicsPoint, a company that operates hotlines, comments that “people have been sitting on grievances that they haven’t felt safe to talk about.” Think of what it’s come to: Oversight and accountability are so poor at many colleges and universities that tuition and taxpayers need to subsidize independent companies, which, to paraphrase one university financial officer, add credibility to the fact that complaints about fiscal misconduct are anonymous. Ferreting out fraud by stealth in order to protect frightened whistle-blowers of course beats not finding out about it at all. But it’s a poor substitute for what a “director of compliance” at one university calls “total ethics.”