On a Friday morning at the University Club of San Francisco, Lee Roberts greets me just hours before his football squad will suffer a crushing loss to Cal—a fumble at the goal line sealing their fate. This is just one more twist in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s costly gamble with Bill Belichick, which has been anything but predictable.
At this moment, Roberts, UNC’s Chancellor, is unaware of the impending defeat. He’s in California to discuss artificial intelligence—a topic that is both progressive and, I suspect, a welcome break from the many challenges facing the prestigious 235-year-old university.
“No one is going to tell graduates, ‘Do your best work, but if you use AI, you’re in trouble,’” Roberts says, emphasizing his main point about equipping students for life after college. “Yet some of our faculty are essentially telling students that right now.”
Roberts has carved out time between meetings with AI firms in the city because UNC has chosen to make artificial intelligence its guiding focus. It’s a strategic move. With thirty years in finance—including as managing partner at a private investment firm and as state budget director under a Republican governor—Roberts also taught budgeting at Duke as an adjunct, but had never held an academic administrative post before stepping in as UNC’s interim chancellor last January, a role made permanent eight months later.
This comes despite the university recently losing 118 federal grants worth $38 million, part of a broader government initiative that cut over 4,000 grants at 600 institutions. Despite more than 900 people signing a statement last year refusing to recognize Roberts as chancellor—calling his appointment a political “coronation” rather than a genuine search. Despite Belichick’s much-hyped return to coaching devolving into a 2-4 disaster, with stories of dysfunction now commonplace in sports media. Roberts remains focused on what’s ahead.
At UNC, Roberts describes a divide: some faculty are “embracing” AI, while others are “burying their heads in the sand.” It’s a diplomatic way of describing a clear cultural clash among faculty at UNC—and likely at universities everywhere. One professor assigns more research than students could possibly finish without AI (“much closer to real-world conditions,” says Roberts), while others view chatbots as akin to performance-enhancing drugs—using them is considered cheating.
“We have 4,000 faculty members,” Roberts notes, as a cable car rattles by outside. “They take pride, as they should, in their independence and the freedom to teach as they see fit.”
This sounds like a subtle way of saying that tenured professors can’t be compelled to change. To move things forward, Roberts is introducing “incentive-based programs,” such as elevating a dean to the new position of Vice Provost for AI. Jeffrey Bardzell, who has taught for over two decades and brings both technological and humanistic expertise, is, according to Roberts, “uniquely qualified to help the faculty as a whole get up to speed.”
Meanwhile, UNC is pushing ahead on other initiatives. Its most significant move so far: the recent announcement that it will combine the School of Data Science and Society with the School of Information and Library Science into a new, as-yet-unnamed entity, with AI at its core.
UNC isn’t the only institution making a major commitment to AI—at least 14 universities now offer undergraduate degrees in artificial intelligence, and schools like Arizona State University have made headlines for weaving AI tools into every field of study.
Still, the creation of this new school has sparked concerns among library science students, who are unsure about the future of their degrees, according to the Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s independent student newspaper. One faculty member, speaking anonymously to the paper, accused Roberts of pushing the merger without a “clear vision” and claimed that the “careers of faculty, staff, and students at both schools are being risked for Roberts’ ego.”
Roberts insists the process will be collaborative, not dictated from above. He emphasizes that the change is meant to be proactive, not reactive. “This isn’t about shutting anything down,” he says. “It’s not primarily a cost-cutting measure,” he adds, perhaps referencing the lost federal research funds, which make up 3.5% of UNC’s total research budget.
Roberts doesn’t downplay the impact of losing grant money—“in many cases, people lose the work of a lifetime,” he admits—but he’s quick to point out that 3.5% falls “well within our typical annual fluctuation.” He also mentions spending “a lot of time talking with policymakers and lawmakers in Washington about the immense value of federal research funding. We need to be especially alert right now, given the uncertainty around these funds, which is really reshaping how major research universities are financed.”
Naturally, this raises broader questions about resources. Although UNC’s AI initiative is the hot topic, I ask about the $10 million a year the university is paying Bill Belichick under a five-year contract signed in January. I mention I’m from Cleveland and recall when Belichick cut local hero Bernie Kosar from the Browns—the city never got over it.
Roberts is prepared for this line of questioning. College athletics are evolving quickly, he says. Every comparable university spends at least as much on football, if not more. Football revenue supports 28 other sports. UNC just claimed its fourth national title in women’s lacrosse and its 23rd in women’s soccer. None of that would be possible without football funding.
“If we’d hired someone else and were losing games, people would be saying, ‘You could have had Bill Belichick,’” Roberts points out.
But the conversation around Belichick isn’t just about wins and losses. Even if that’s the bottom line, numerous reports have described turmoil within the program, with players, parents, coaches, and administrators all suggesting that the legendary NFL coach’s methods don’t resonate with college athletes.
Still, Roberts says he isn’t swayed by “a few news articles.” “In my view, Coach Belichick has done a great job connecting with our campus,” Roberts says. He attends other teams’ games, sends pizzas to fraternities on weekends, and grew up on a college campus—his father coached at Navy.
Just hours after our meeting, UNC will fall to Cal when wide receiver Nathan Leacock loses possession of the ball at the goal line, costing them a game-winning touchdown. I can only imagine the immediate fallout in Chapel Hill.
I suspect Roberts will take it in stride. He may never win over those who object to his nontraditional academic background, but he can’t let that distract him. I mention that the petition with 900 signatures objected to the fact that, among the top 50 universities, Roberts is the only leader without experience in higher education administration. The petition was published in the Daily Tar Heel, which has consistently criticized his leadership.
“I don’t think it was 900 students,” Roberts corrects me. “It was 900 people—students, faculty, staff, or anyone else who signed an online petition.”
I ask how he felt about the controversy. “No matter your background before taking on a role like this, there’s a lot to learn,” Roberts says. If you were a provost, you might not know much about the business, finance, political, operational, or real estate aspects of a university. If you came from the business world, you’d have to get up to speed on the academic side.
It’s a fair observation. Today’s university chancellor is part CEO, part diplomat, part fundraiser, and part sports manager. It’s unlikely anyone starts with all the necessary skills. “Almost no matter what you did before, there’s a learning curve in a job like this,” Roberts says.
What stands out about Roberts is his calm demeanor. The federal funding cuts are manageable. The Belichick hire is a wait-and-see situation. Faculty resistance to AI is just another challenge to address.
He’s making bold moves at a time when higher education is under pressure from all sides. Federal funding is unpredictable. Declining birth rates threaten future enrollment. The value of a college degree is being questioned, as more graduates find themselves in low-paying jobs they could have gotten without a degree. Now, AI threatens to disrupt the entire system.
But where others see crisis, Roberts sees possibility. He also believes the window to act is shorter than many realize. “The challenge with AI is that we need to move quickly and collaborate across disciplines,” he says. “And those are two things universities haven’t historically excelled at.”
Whether Roberts’ approach will succeed is still uncertain. What is clear is that he believes acting decisively and embracing change is preferable to clinging to tradition at a top-ranked institution like UNC.
“Our goal is to make Carolina the leading public university in the country,” he tells me.
It’s a bold ambition, and as he shares it, he sounds—rightly or wrongly—a lot like a Silicon Valley CEO.
If you’d like to hear the full interview with Roberts, check out TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast; new episodes are released every Tuesday.
