RALEIGH, N.C. — There have been violent threats, angry screeds, Twitter flame campaigns and an entire website predicated on the putative hideousness of Dan Kane’s existence. Someone sent Kane an email wishing him a lingering death by bone cancer. Someone else tweeted him a photograph of a noose.  Emotions can run amok when you take on something as sacrosanct as the athletic program at the University of North Carolina, as Kane, 53, has found in the last few years. A member of a three-person investigative team (with a half-time fourth person) at The News & Observer, he has helped unearth, often against serious university resistance, many of the most shocking examples of malfeasance that have come to light, one after another, in the worst academic scandal in the university’s history.  It was Kane, building on a moment of neat online sleuthing by fans of North Carolina’s bitter rival North Carolina State, who first uncovered a pattern of lax oversight and risibly easy or nonexistent classes disproportionately benefiting athletes in the university’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies. It was Kane who first raised questions about the failings of the department’s chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, and whose reporting laid the groundwork for Nyang’oro’s resignation and eventual indictment on criminal charges. It was Kane whose work indirectly touched off several major investigations by the university.  But Kane is a polarizing figure, even outside the bloviating world of online outrage, as much as it is possible for someone as seemingly mild mannered as he is to rouse strong opinions. Some Chapel Hill alumni, faculty members and readers say that his paper, known locally as the N&O (and sometimes as the Nuisance and Disturber), has done a great public service in forcing the university to investigate and confront its past mistakes.  “If not for the relentless reporting of Dan Kane, the university would have gotten away with everything,” said Jay M. Smith, a history professor who has been a persistent critic of the university.  John L. Robinson, a former editor of The News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., and now an adjunct lecturer at U.N.C.’s journalism school, said, “The N&O has been the pivotal figure in attempting to get to the bottom of what’s happened at the university, and the university has seemed to resist at every step.”  Others more or less wish Kane would just go away. This category includes Tar Heels fans and alumni outraged at what they say are his wrongheaded efforts to link the academic scandal to the sports program; North Carolina administrators who, he says, no longer take his calls; and faculty members who believe Kane is looking for Watergate-style sports-related conspiracies that simply do not exist.  Andrew J. Perrin, a U.N.C. sociology professor, said that the paper “has developed a viewpoint that believes the university is monolithic, defensive, and evasive” and that it prefers to “focus on sensationalism.”  “I think that the university administration has been remarkably methodical and transparent in its approach to the situation, has provided lots of information, and has been unusually open to involving faculty in the processes of investigation and reform,” Perrin said via email.  As of last December, when Nyang’oro was indicted on charges of accepting $12,000 for teaching a class that did not exist, university officials were maintaining that there was nothing new to discover. Numerous major internal and external investigations, they pointed out, had already identified more than 200 questionable classes and more than 500 instances of unauthorized grade changes in the African studies department.  The university officials also made sure to note the many reforms they had put into place, including cutting the organizational ties between the athletic department and the academic support program for student-athletes, cracking down on independent studies courses and performing spot checks on classes to ensure that they were in fact meeting.  But in February, the university switched course after the district attorney prosecuting Nyang’oro announced that new information about what went on in the African studies department had come to light because of the cooperation of Deborah Crowder, a former administrator in the department. U.N.C. announced that it had commissioned yet another investigation, this one led by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a lawyer in Washington, that would finally bring “closure” to the matter.  To understand how the university got to this point, it is necessary to return to the curious case of Michael McAdoo, a Tar Heels player kicked off the football team in 2010 after it emerged that he had violated N.C.A.A. rules by accepting outside benefits and too much help from an academic tutor. In 2011, he filed a lawsuit against the university, seeking reinstatement.  In his court filing was a term paper on the evolution of Swahili culture in East Africa. The N.C.A.A. had found that McAdoo had been improperly helped on the paper by an academic adviser who had written the footnotes and the bibliography. McAdoo argued that her help was negligible.  And there it would have ended, as just another lawsuit, if not for the freelance sleuthing of a North Carolina State Wolfpack fan who calls himself WufWuf1 on Twitter. The Wolfpack fans are implacable rivals of the Tar Heels fans, and the two groups are continually looking for ways to plague one another.  Examining the paper, WufWuf1, who is in his mid-40s, works with computers and asked that his real name not be printed because he did not want to be harassed by Tar Heels fans, found that it was a compendium of plagiarized material. A book published 100 years earlier, for instance, proved to be the source of McAdoo’s assertion that Africa’s population is 160 million (the current figure is closer to 1 billion).  Enter Dan Kane, who had just been assigned to take over the story about North Carolina’s athletic scandal. Like many local newspapers in the last decade, the N&O has seen its newsroom shrink by about 50 percent; it currently has about 45 reporters. But it has a long tradition of investigative reporting, and so it has allowed Kane, occasionally working with others, to follow the story full time.  Kane saw the accusations on a sports blog and conducted his own investigation, verifying the plagiarism charges. The N&O published his article on July 9, 2011.  At first, the issue seemed confined to plagiarism — why, Kane asked the university, had no one noticed? But then it quickly expanded into something bigger, when Kane separately obtained the transcript of a onetime North Carolina football player, Marvin Austin.  The transcript showed that though Austin performed woefully badly in most of his courses, he received a B-plus in an advanced class on Afro-American bioethics that was taught by the same person listed as the academic supervisor on the McAdoo term paper — Julius Nyang’oro, then the chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies department.  Kane began asking questions about Nyang’oro and also, after a tip from a whistle-blower named Mary Willingham who had been a learning specialist for student-athletes, about the department’s “paper classes.” These were classes, Willingham said, that never met but required only that the students turn in a paper.  Several weeks later, Nyang’oro resigned as the department chairman (he retired from North Carolina the next summer) and the university ordered the first of many investigations.  At a time when questions are being raised around the country about whether it even makes sense to expect full-time college athletes to keep up with academic programs, U.N.C. prides itself on what it calls the Carolina Way — an ability to balance academics and sports. Seeking to avoid the appearance that the troubles in the African studies department were directly linked to the athletic program, the university has pointed out, correctly, that nonathletes also benefited from the lax or nonexistent classes.  While criticizing Kane’s reporting, North Carolina has also gone to great lengths to discredit the work of Willingham, the learning specialist, who resigned from the university last week, saying that the atmosphere had become too difficult. Willingham maintains that the university routinely admitted underprepared athletes with substandard reading levels and steered them into questionable classes.  Finding itself at a dead end, the N&O recently sued U.N.C., seeking records about athletes’ enrollment in the questionable classes dating back to the 1990s. The newspaper says it needs the information to determine if there is any link between the athletic department and what went on in the African studies department. The university says that releasing the records would violate student confidentiality.  The university said via email that it had acknowledged the work of “the media” in uncovering the scandal. But it is not so happy about its current work.  “We admire the News & Observer’s long tradition of fair-minded journalism; we just wish they would practice it more often,” the university’s newly appointed vice chancellor for communications, Joel Curran, said in a statement. “In our case, the paper seems more content to rehash old news rather than report new solutions.”  Not surprisingly, Kane sees it differently.  “They have done all kinds of things to prevent this from ever happening again, and they emphasize that many, many times,” he said. “But what’s left unanswered is how this all happened, and what actually happened. That’s where the battle forms. It’s like that old saying about history — if you don’t understand it, you’re doomed to repeat it.”  A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2014, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Reporter Digging Into Scandal Hits a University’s Raw Nerve . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
The University of North Carolina has been at odds with a journalist for a Raleigh newspaper over his exposés of academic malfeasance at the university, some of it relating to athletes.