Kansas University and the University Daily Kansan have a public responsibility to release the terms of a legal settlement related to the student newspaper’s funding.

This week, the two entities announced that the Kansan’s lawsuit, filed after the KU Student Senate voted to reduce the student fee to support the newspaper, had been resolved “to their satisfaction.” It was agreed that both sides would pay their own costs related to the litigation, but neither side would release additional details on what the settlement involved.

The decision of a public university and its student newspaper to withhold those details is needlessly secretive and could raise public suspicions about the nature of the settlement.

The Student Senate voted in spring 2015 to cut student funding of the Kansan in half by reducing the per-student fee from $2 to $1 and the total revenue going to the newspaper from about $90,000 to about $45,000 for the 2015-16 school year. In February 2016, Kansan editors sued KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Tammara Durham, who had signed off on the fee decision. The lawsuit claimed that the funding cut was prompted by unflattering news coverage of the Senate and, therefore, represented a violation of First Amendment protections for a free press.

After the lawsuit was filed, the Student Senate reversed course and restored the $2-per-student fee. The Kansan has reported that the fee will remain in place through fiscal year 2019, after which the newspaper will seek no funding from the student fee.

Maybe that agreement to phase out the fee for the Kansan was part of the undisclosed settlement, but there’s no way to know. In all likelihood, the terms of the settlement were innocent and proper enough, but the refusal of the parties to comment on those terms could raise suspicions about the deal. If KU administrators and the student newspaper have nothing to hide, why not just disclose the details of the settlement and clear the air on this issue?