Lee Roberts meets me at the University Club of San Francisco on a Friday morning. Hours later, his football team will lose to Cal in heartbreaking fashion due to a fumbled goal line play. Little about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s expensive experiment with hiring Bill Belichick has gone according to script. But Roberts, the Chancellor of UNC, does not know this yet. He is in California to talk about artificial intelligence, a forward-thinking topic that also seems like a welcome distraction from other events at the 235-year-old school.
Roberts explains his central thesis about preparing students for the real world. He states that no employer will tell a graduate to do their best job but forbid them from using AI. Yet he notes that some faculty members are effectively saying that to students right now. Roberts is in the city for meetings with AI companies because UNC has decided to make AI its north star. This is a business bet for a leader with three decades in finance, most recently as a managing partner of a private investment firm. He served as state budget director under a Republican governor and taught budgeting as an adjunct at Duke. He had no prior academic administration experience before becoming UNC’s interim chancellor last January, a post made permanent eight months later.
This focus on AI continues despite recent challenges. The university lost 118 federal grants totaling thirty-eight million dollars as part of a sweeping federal effort to terminate grants across hundreds of institutions. More than nine hundred people signed a statement saying they would not recognize Roberts as chancellor, calling his appointment a political coronation rather than a search. Meanwhile, Belichick’s much-touted return to football is currently a two-and-four trainwreck, with stories about the team’s dysfunction becoming routine. Roberts remains focused on the future.
At UNC, Roberts describes a spectrum of faculty attitudes toward AI. Some are leaning forward with the technology while others have their heads in the sand. This diplomatic phrasing describes a culture war in faculty lounges. One professor assigns more research than students could complete without AI, which Roberts calls closer to a real world scenario. Others treat chatbots like anabolic steroids and consider their use cheating. Roberts notes the university has four thousand faculty members who pride themselves on their independence and autonomy in teaching.
Creating incentive-based programs is his strategy to move forward. He promoted a dean into the role of Vice Provost for AI. That individual, Jeffrey Bardzell, is a professor with more than twenty years of experience in both technology and the humanities. Roberts believes he is exceptionally well-placed to help the faculty come further up to speed.
UNC is barreling ahead on other fronts. In its biggest development to date, the university announced it is merging two schools, the School of Data Science and Society and the School of Information and Library Science, into one yet-to-be-named entity with AI studies at its center. UNC is not alone in betting big on AI. At least fourteen colleges now offer bachelor’s degrees in the field, and other universities have made headlines for integrating AI tools across disciplines.
This move has created concern. Library science students wonder what will happen to their degrees, and at least one faculty member complained anonymously, saying Roberts pushed for the new school without a cogent idea of what it will entail and that careers are being sacrificed to his ego. Roberts says the implementation will be collaborative, not top-down. He is clear the move is proactive, not reactive, and is not about shutting anything down or predominantly about cost savings, a possible nod to the lost federal research dollars which amount to three and a half percent of UNC’s overall research funding.
Roberts does not minimize the devastation of losing grants, acknowledging that people can lose their life’s work. But he is quick to note that three and a half percent is well within the average annual variance. He adds that he spends a lot of time talking with policymakers in Washington about the tremendous good of federal research funding and the need for vigilance given current uncertainty.
The conversation turns to resources. I ask about the ten million dollars the school is paying Bill Belichick annually as part of a five-year deal signed in January. Roberts is ready for this question. He says college sports are changing rapidly and that every peer institution spends at least as much on football, with many spending more. He states that football drives revenue for twenty-eight other sports, including recent national championships in women’s lacrosse and soccer, which would not happen without football money. He suggests that if they had hired someone else and were losing games, people would be asking why they did not hire Belichick.
The prevailing narrative about Belichick is not just about wins and losses, with numerous stories describing chaos inside the program. They paint a picture of a legendary NFL coach whose style does not translate to college kids. But Roberts says he does not make decisions based on a couple of news stories. He believes Coach Belichick has done a really good job integrating with the campus, showing up at other teams’ games, sending pizzas to fraternities, and understanding campus life from his own upbringing.
Hours after our conversation, UNC would lose to Cal when a wide receiver fumbled the ball just as he was crossing into the end zone for what would have been the game-winning touchdown. I can only imagine the reaction in Chapel Hill. My sense is that Roberts will brush it off. He may never be forgiven for his lack of a traditional academic background, but he cannot afford to care that this bothers some people. I note that the nine-hundred-person petition took issue with him being the only leader among the top fifty universities without higher education administration experience.
Roberts corrects me, pointing out it was nine hundred people regardless of affiliation, not necessarily nine hundred students. When asked how he felt about the episode, he says that no matter your background, you have a lot to learn in this job. A provost would know nothing about the business or operational sides, while someone from business would need to learn the academic side. He believes almost no one arrives with all the required skills and there is always a learning curve.
What is striking about Roberts is that he seems relatively unbothered. The federal funding cuts are within the normal range. The Belichick hire is a wait-and-see situation. The faculty’s resistance to AI is a puzzle to be solved. He is making big bets as higher education is being squeezed. Federal funding is uncertain. Birth rate declines threaten future enrollment. The value of a college degree is in question, with some graduates finding only low-wage jobs available. Now AI threatens to upend the whole model.
But Roberts sees opportunity where others see a crisis. He believes the window of opportunity is short. The challenge of AI is that the university must work relatively quickly and cooperate across academic disciplines, two things universities are historically not especially good at. Whether his game plan works remains to be seen. What is clear is that he is betting that moving fast and shaking things up is better than moving slowly and preserving tradition at a highly ranked UNC.
He states his ambitious vision clearly, saying they are going to try to make Carolina the number one public university in America. As he delivers this line, for better or worse, he sounds very much like a Silicon Valley CEO.