Lee Roberts met me Friday morning at the San Francisco University Club. That was just hours before his football team lost to Cal in heartbreaking fashion on a goal-line fumble. Because Bill Belichick and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s expensive experiment didn’t go according to script.
But UNC Chairman Roberts doesn’t know that yet. Now he’s in California to talk about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a forward-thinking idea, but it’s also a great distraction from the many other things going on at this venerable 235-year-old school, which scares the specter.
“Nobody says that. [students after they graduate from college]”‘Do the best job you can, but with AI, you’re going to be in trouble,'” Roberts told me, leaning into the central theme of preparing students for the real world. “But some faculty members are now effectively telling their students that.”
As UNC has decided to make AI its north star, Roberts joins me in between other meetings with AI companies in the city. Indeed, this is a business gamble. Mr. Roberts has been in the financial industry for 30 years, most recently as a managing partner at a private investment firm and as state budget director under a Republican governor. He taught budgeting part-time at Duke University, but had no experience in academic administration until he became UNC’s interim president last January, a position that became permanent eight months later.
Never mind that the university just lost 118 federal grants, totaling $38 million, as part of the federal government’s sweeping effort to terminate more than 4,000 grants across 600 institutions. Never mind that more than 900 people signed a statement last year at the time of Roberts’ appointment saying they would not recognize him as prime minister, calling the process a political “coronation” rather than a search. Never mind that Belichick’s much-touted return to football is now a dismal 2-4, and stories about team dysfunction have become daily fodder for sportswriters. Roberts is focused on the future.
At UNC, Roberts explains, there’s a spectrum between faculty who are “proactive” about AI and faculty who are “preoccupied.” This is a diplomatic way of expressing what is clearly a culture war being waged in the faculty lounge at UNC, and perhaps at other schools around the world. One UNC professor is assigning more research than his students could complete without the AI (“much closer to real-world scenarios,” Roberts says), while another treats chatbots like anabolic steroids. Using them is cheating.
“We have 4,000 faculty and staff,” Roberts said as the cable car rattled past the open window next to the table. “And they are rightly proud of their independence and autonomy in how they teach their classes.”
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This sounds like code for “nothing can be forced on a tenured professor.” So Roberts is creating an “incentive-based program” to move the ball forward, including promoting one of the department chairs to become the university’s vice president for AI. That person, Jeffrey Basel, has been a professor for more than 20 years and has “both technology and humanist experience,” Roberts said, adding that Basel is “very well positioned to help the entire faculty get up to speed even more.”
Like them, UNC is pushing forward on other fronts. In its biggest development yet, the university announced this month that it will combine its two departments, the School of Data Science and Society and the School of Information and Library Science, into a single organization (name to be determined) with AI research at the center of the Venn diagram.
UNC isn’t the only school betting big on AI. At least 14 universities currently offer a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence, and universities like Arizona State University are making headlines for integrating AI tools across all disciplines.
Still, the creation of the new school has some of the school’s library science students worried about what will happen to their degrees, judging by a report in the school’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel. At least one faculty member also complained anonymously in a statement to the newspaper, saying Roberts had promoted the school without “compelling ideas” about its content, adding: “The careers of faculty, staff and students at both schools are being sacrificed to Roberts’ ego.”
Roberts said implementation will be collaborative rather than top-down. He also made it clear that this move is proactive, not reactive. “This is not about closing anything down,” he says. “This is not primarily a cost-cutting measure,” he continued, which could imply a loss in federal research funding, which amounts to 3.5 percent of UNC’s overall research funding.
Roberts doesn’t downplay the devastation of losing the grant. “In many cases, [people] You’ll lose your life’s work,” he admits, but is also quick to point out that 3.5% is “within average annual fluctuations.” He added: “I have spent a lot of time talking with policymakers and legislators in Washington about the tremendous benefits of federal research funding.” At a time of so much uncertainty, we need to be especially vigilant [these dollars] That means we are changing the fundamental structure of funding for large research universities. ”
Of course, questions arise about resources as a whole. While UNC’s AI push is a daily topic of discussion, I wanted to ask about the $10 million the school is paying Bill Belichick each year as part of the five-year contract he signed in January. I’m from Cleveland, I tell Roberts. I remember when Belichick cut Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar, a hometown hero. The city never forgave him.
Roberts is ready for that. College sports are changing rapidly, he says. Every comparable institution spends at least as much money on soccer. Many people spend more money. Soccer drives revenue for 28 other sports. UNC won its fourth national championship in women’s lacrosse and its 23rd national championship in women’s soccer. Without football money, none of it happens.
“If you were hiring someone else and we were, [down some games]everyone would say, “Hey, I wish it was Bill Belichick,”” Roberts suggests.
In fact, the general story about Belichick is about more than just wins and losses. Numerous news outlets have published articles describing the turmoil within the program, with players, parents, coaches and administrators all painting a picture of a legendary NFL coach whose style is incomprehensible to college students, even if that’s ultimately exactly what happened.
But Roberts says he’s not making decisions based on “a few news articles.” “I think Coach Belichick has integrated well into our campus,” Roberts said. He also appears at other teams’ games. He sends pizza to fraternities on Saturday nights. He grew up on a college campus, where his father was a coach at Navy. ”
A few hours after our conversation, wide receiver Nathan Leacock lost control of the ball as he entered the end zone for what would have been the game-clinching touchdown, resulting in UNC’s loss to Cal. One can only imagine what the immediate reaction was in Chapel Hill.
My sense is that Roberts will ignore it. His lack of a traditional academic background may never be forgivable, but he also cannot afford to worry about it bothering some people. It is worth noting that the 900-strong petition takes issue with the fact that Roberts is the only leader at the top 50 universities without experience in higher education administration. The petition was published in the Daily Tar Heel, which has been critical of Roberts’ tenure as prime minister.
“I don’t think it was 900 students,” Roberts corrected me. “I think there were 900 people who signed the online petition, whether they were students, faculty or staff, or people from all over the world.”
Ask them how they felt about the episode overall. “No matter what your background was before taking this job, there’s going to be a lot to learn,” Roberts says. If you were president, you wouldn’t know anything about “the business, financial, budgetary, political, operational, or real estate aspects of the university.” If you come from a business background, you need to learn the academic side.
That’s a reasonable point. Modern university presidents are CEOs, diplomats, fundraisers, and sports executives. Chances are, no one will have all the skills you need. “I think there’s always a learning curve, no matter what you did before you got a job like this,” Roberts says.
What strikes me about Roberts is that he seems relatively unconcerned. Federal funding reductions are within normal ranges. Belichick’s hiring is a wait-and-see situation. There is a mystery to be solved about some of the faculty resistance to AI.
He’s also making a big bet at a time when higher education is under pressure on all fronts. Federal funding is uncertain. Declining birth rates threaten future enrollment. The value of a college degree is being questioned, and more and more students are finding that once they graduate, their only options are low-wage jobs that don’t require them to spend billions on college. Now, AI threatens to upend the entire model.
But Roberts sees opportunity where others might see crisis. He also believes the window of opportunity is shorter than some imagine. “The challenge with AI is that you have to work relatively quickly and you have to collaborate across disciplines,” he says. “And those are two things that historically colleges have not been particularly good at.”
It remains to be seen whether Roberts’ game plan will work. What is clear is that he is betting that it is better to move quickly and shake things up than to move slowly and stick to tradition at highly ranked UNC.
“We’re going to strive to make Carolina the number one public university in America,” he told me.
It’s an ambitious vision, and the man who brings it to life is a lot like a Silicon Valley CEO, for better or for worse.
To hear this interview with Roberts, listen to TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
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