Lee Roberts meets me at the University Club of San Francisco on a Friday morning, hours before his football team will lose to Cal in heartbreaking fashion – a fumble at the goal line, because little about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s expensive experiment with Bill Belichick has gone according to script.
But Roberts, the Chancellor of UNC, doesn’t know this yet. Right now, he’s in California to talk about artificial intelligence, which is both forward thinking and also – I’d hazard a guess – a welcome distraction from a lot else happening at the 235-year-old school.
“No one’s going to say to [students after they graduate from college], ‘Do the best job you can, but if you use AI, you’ll be in trouble,’” Roberts tells me, leaning into his central thesis about preparing students for the real world. “Yet we have some faculty members who are effectively saying that to students right now.”
Roberts has joined me in between other meetings in the city with AI companies because UNC has decided to make AI its north star. It’s a business bet, really. Roberts spent three decades in finance, most recently as managing partner of a private investment firm, and served as state budget director under a Republican governor. He taught budgeting as an adjunct at Duke but never worked in academic administration before becoming UNC’s interim chancellor in January of last year, a post made permanent eight months later.
Never mind that the university just lost 118 federal grants totaling $38 million as part of a sweeping effort by the federal government to terminate more than 4,000 grants across 600 institutions. Never mind that more than 900 people last year signed a statement saying they wouldn’t recognize Roberts as chancellor when he was appointed, calling the process a political “coronation” rather than a search. Never mind that Belichick’s much-touted return to football is currently a 2-4 trainwreck, with write-ups about the team’s dysfunction becoming routine fodder for sports writers. Roberts is focused on the future.
At UNC, Roberts explains, there’s a spectrum between faculty who are “leaning forward” with AI and those who have “their heads in the sand.” It’s diplomatic phrasing for what is clearly a culture war playing out in faculty lounges across UNC and – it’s probably safe to assume – at other schools across the world. While one UNC professor is assigning more research than students could complete without AI (“much closer to a real world scenario,” says Roberts), others are treating chatbots like anabolic steroids. If you use them, you’re cheating.
“We have 4,000 faculty members,” Roberts says, as a cable car clatters past the open window beside our table. “And they pride themselves, as they should, on their independence and autonomy in how they teach their classes.”
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