Dan Kane
The key player in the years-long probe of academic fraud at the University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill isn’t an administrator or professor. He doesn’t work for the government, an accrediting agency, or the NCAA.
Instead, he’s an unassuming reporter at The News & Observer, a Raleigh newspaper, who slowly uncovered a shocking case of fake classes wrapped up in an athletics scandal at one of the nation’s premier public colleges. Dan Kane’s work over the past four years has put higher education on notice about the institutional perils of college sports.
Mr. Kane, 53, was the quiet force behind a much-publicized report, released in October, that found that more than 3,000 students participated in an 18-year-long scheme of fake classes that was intended to keep struggling athletes eligible at UNC-Chapel Hill. The report also implicated professors, advisers, coaches, even a former faculty chair.
“As a university president, if you don’t look at this report and ask, ‘Can I be certain that we have the right checks and balances in place?’ you’ve missed the boat,” one college president said in response to the investigation, which was led by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor.
But the Wainstein report would not have been commissioned without Mr. Kane, who wrote story after story establishing an athletic connection to the fake classes, even as the university—and a former governor it tapped to investigate the scandal in 2012—strenuously denied the link. But as national publications began picking up the leads Mr. Kane established, the university initiated the review by Mr. Wainstein.
So profound was Mr. Kane’s influence in exposing the saga that he became a character himself. Legions of UNC-Chapel Hill sports fans took aim at him, sending threatening emails and tweets. The News & Observer called the police twice when the threats got serious.
“It was pretty jarring to get these emails and tweets and see some of these things on the message boards that were so full of hate and no desire to really look at the facts here,” Mr. Kane said in an interview. “It’s almost like that’s how they contribute to the team.”
The sway athletics holds—not over fans’ emotions, but the actions of university leaders and the mission of the college itself—is the first lesson of the episode. “It just seems to epitomize what’s going on with college athletics” at big programs across the country, Mr. Kane said. “It’s become so powerful that it’s kind of the tail wagging the dog.”
UNC-Chapel Hill might be able to end no-show classes, he said, but whether it can achieve the academic-athletic balance it once boasted remains to be seen.
For his part, Mr. Kane will keep reporting. “Things come my way, and if I feel like the public needs to know about them,” he said, “I’m gonna pursue them.”
—Andy Thomason
