Dan Kane, a first-rate and persistent North Carolina journalist, broke and pursued and ultimately owned the University of North Carolina academic fraud story.
Given the loathing of sports factories for outsiders who disrupt the smooth production of football games, Kane “was subject to violent threats from UNC fans and a variety of multimedia smear campaigns.”
He wasn’t the only one, of course – all sorts of people who take academic integrity seriously got hit right in the kisser by everyone from the highest snoots in the administration to the lowest yahoos in the stands. But since everything that Kane and the whistle blowers were saying about the big ol’ UNC cheating machine was true, the school was forced to back up into p.r. mode and stop trying to disembowel all the mean people who were saying mean things about it.
Kane has now won (UD thanks her friend John for sending her the link) the McCulloch Courage in Journalism Award.
UD sees that Kane “grew up on a small dairy farm in Upstate New York” (Les UDs, regular readers know, have a small spread of their own upstate) and is “a graduate of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y.” UD taught for a couple of semesters at that school way back when (Mr UD had taken his first job, at the University of Rochester), and it’s not impossible that this guy might have been in one of her classes…
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UPDATE: Dan Kane read my post and said he graduated from St. John Fisher in 1983 and “took enough English classes to qualify for a minor but I don’t remember having [Soltan] as a professor.” But I was Margaret Rapp then, so there’s still the teeniest possibility…