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.