A group of professors from public and private colleges across North Carolina has for months been criticizing a conservative think tank in Raleigh: They say the non-profit Civitas Institute purports to be independent, but really is an arm of the state Republican Party, and that it is trying to bully liberal academics in the state’s public university system....

Outside of the State House, Nancy MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, told reporters that she was troubled by connections between Civitas and McCrory’s administration. The family of the governor’s Budget Director Art Pope has funded more than 90 percent of the operations of Civitas, MacLean said.

“Citizens may reasonably infer that a sitting adiminstration is using a private,  tax-exempt non-profit organization founded by one of its leading officials to intimidate future political dissent,” Maclean said. “That’s serious.”...