Thirty professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill signed a letter, published on Tuesday, that questions the motives of a conservative group that is seeking emails, phone records, and other documents from the director of a poverty center at the university’s law school.
The public-records request was filed in October by the Civitas Institute, which bills itself as “North Carolina’s conservative voice.” The group is seeking six weeks’ worth of documents from Gene R. Nichol, a former dean of the law school who is now director of its Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity. Eric L. Muller, a professor who helped circulate the letter, told The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, that he thought the records request was an attempt at intimidation.
Civitas’s president, Francis X. De Luca, rejected that criticism. He declined to say exactly why his group had filed the records request, but he said that Mr. Nichol, as director of the poverty center, was “not your normal faculty member” and that there were reasons “to want to know what he does, way outside of his role as a professor.”
Mr. Nichol also writes an op-ed column for The News & Observer. In a column published days before the Civitas records request was filed, he criticized the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, for not attending the funeral last August of the civil-rights leader Julius Chambers and for later signing “the country’s most oppressive voting bill.”
Mr. Nichol has squared off with conservatives before—notably, during his tenure as president of the College of William and Mary, in Virginia. He told The News & Observer on Tuesday that the new scrutiny from Civitas was unlikely to curb his commentary. “I’m too old for that,” he said. “I try to avoid being bullied by thugs, so I don’t think I’ll change.”
The professors’ letter was published online on Tuesday by The Chapel Hill News. The full text follows.
Civitas Request Troubles Faculty
The Civitas Institute, a private organization that says its mission is to protect liberty, has demanded to review all of the email correspondence, phone records, and calendars of our friend and colleague Gene Nichol, Director of the Center on Work, Poverty, and Opportunity at the UNC School of Law, over a six-week period this fall.
Surveilling a professor’s communications is a really troubling approach to protecting liberty.
We deeply admire Gene Nichol’s commitment to protecting and speaking for the state’s poor and disempowered. The only comfort we take from this sorry request by Civitas is our confidence that it will increase his passion.
Eric Muller
Maxine Eichner
Editor’s note: This letter was also signed by 28 other current and retired members of the university faculty.