Dive Brief:

• Professors at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are standing behind a liberal colleague after a conservative think tank requested his emails, phone records and calendars.
• "Surveilling a professor’s communications is a really troubling approach to protecting liberty," the law professors wrote in a public letter.
• The leader of the think tank told a reporter: "They’re all tenured law professors making big bucks, far more than I make. ... What are they scared of?"

Dive Insight:

The think tank did not say why it wanted Professor Gene Nichol's records, but it's safe to say it wasn't to issue him a medal. The think tank, Civitas Institute, promotes limited government, while Nichol is the head of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity and had ties to former Democratic U.S. Sen. John Edwards.