The Catalyze podcast: Where the University is headed, with UNC–Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts

Lee Roberts, the thirteenth chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sat down with scholar host Allyson Horst ’26 to share his vision for Carolina under his leadership. The two discuss the University’s strategic priorities, with a focus on the areas of artificial intelligence, enrollment growth, investments in applied sciences, a physical master plan, the launch of the School of Civic Life and Leadership, and athletics. Roberts also responds to the UNC System’s DEI policy and rollout, recent campus protests, and his perspective on free speech at a leading public university.

Roberts was elected chancellor by the UNC Board of Governors on August 9, 2024. He succeeded previous Catalyze guest Kevin Guskiewicz. The immediate past chancellor was appointed president of Michigan State University.

Before recording this episode, the chancellor spoke with scholars at a Food for Thought event at the Morehead-Cain Foundation on September 27.

Modeled after the City Club of Cleveland, Food for Thought provides a central meeting place for members of diverse beliefs and opinions to participate in free and open discussions. The breakfast and conversation series is an initiative of Team Cleveland members from the 2022 Morehead-Cain Civic Collaboration program.

Listen to the episode.

Music credits

The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on social media @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode transcription

(Allyson)

Thank you, Chancellor Roberts, for speaking with me today. So, you’re here for Morehead-Cain’s Food for Thought speaker series. What do you hope scholars take away from your talk today?

(Chancellor Roberts)

Well, I really just always enjoy speaking with students. It’s easily the best part of the job as chancellor. I wish I had more time to do it, but I’m really excited to be with the students today.

(Allyson)

That’s amazing. And we’re excited to have you here today. It’s not very often that you get college students waking up this early, especially when it’s muggy and rainy out. So, we’re all excited to have you. But, Chancellor Roberts, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know much about you. And I think the student body could say the same thing. So, tell me a little bit about yourself. What are your connections to Carolina and the Triangle area?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I’m not trying to be mysterious. I’m trying to get out and meet as many people as possible. I grew up in the D.C. area. I first came to North Carolina when I was 17 years old to go to college at another school that we don’t need to mention. And then I left and went back to D.C. for law school, spent time in London and in New York, and then moved back to North Carolina about 19 years ago now. I’ve been in the private sector just about all my career, but I’ve always tried to stay involved in public service. I served as budget director for the state of North Carolina a few years ago. Just before coming into this role, I served on the board of governors for the UNC System. I taught for a while at the other school that I’m not going to name. I’ve been in and around higher education and public service, but this is my first full-time role in higher education.

(Allyson)

Yeah, and you’re talking about making that shift from finance to more of a higher education standpoint. So, what clicked for you? What made you make that change?

(Chancellor Roberts)

It’s a great question. We’re in our 230th academic year, and I’m confident that for every one of those 230 years, this has been the most important institution in the state of North Carolina. If you care about higher education, if you care about the future of this state, you have to care about what happens here at Carolina. It’s going to be the most important institution in this state for at least the next 230 years. I believe that the future belongs to North Carolina, and this university is the most important pillar on which we build that future.

(Allyson)

I can imagine it was a very lengthy process to become chancellor. What made you stand out within that application process? What do you think were the characteristics that you had that set you apart from everybody else?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I was a participant in the search process, and that question might be better directed to somebody who was on the search committee. I don’t know who the other applicants in the process were. But I hope the fact that I bring a private sector perspective, but also have meaningful public sector experience, some meaningful familiarity with higher education from my time on the board of governors, my time on the board of the community college system, my time in the classroom, combined with a love for and knowledge of the state. Hopefully, all those things made a difference. The fact that I’ve been doing the job as interim by the time I was named for eight months at that point might have been a factor as well.

(Allyson)

Yeah, I’d assume. But what are some of the most top priorities for your chancellorship at UNC?

(Chancellor Roberts)

There are all kinds of things going on all the time. But when I think about the things that we’re still going to be talking about a year from now, five years from now, probably 10 years from now, I think about a few distinct areas.

We had working groups in place to update the strategic plan in four areas: artificial intelligence, what’s our strategy there? Enrollment—should we grow, and if so, how? Applied sciences—should we grow the programs that we have now? Biomedical engineering, data science, environmental engineering—should we add to them? What would those be? And then the physical master plan for the campus.

We had four strategic working groups working on those topics. They all reported back at the beginning of August, and now we’re in the implementation and execution phase. And then two other topics, I think about, are the launch of our School of Civic Life and Leadership that is underway with the new minor this fall. A lot of new faculty hired, 12 new faculty hired since the dean was hired in March. And then everything happening around college athletics, a lot of time spent on that. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

(Allyson)

Yeah. And you just mentioned AI. Tell me a little bit about how UNC is incorporating AI within its systems.

(Chancellor Roberts)

So, it’s a real challenge, not just because it’s a new technology, but also because it’s changing so quickly. I keep telling faculty members, if you played around with ChatGPT when it first came out 18 months ago and haven’t looked at it since then, it’s night and day different. We’ve really never seen a pace of technological change like this. I’m old enough to remember in the mid-1990s, I was a young investment banker, and that was the time of the Netscape IPO and the huge boom in the internet. People said, “In the future, we’re not going to talk about internet companies and internet strategy because that’s going to be built into every enterprise.” That turned out to be true. We don’t have an Internet strategy now as a university. It’s fully integrated into everything we do, and I’m confident that’s going to be true for AI as well.

We’re not there yet, though, and we need to make progress on at least three areas. What should our research strategy be? And that can’t be everything to all people. We need to place bets and have some focus. How do we deploy it internally to make our operations more effective? And then probably most importantly, how do we use it in the classroom? Right now, that’s very idiosyncratic. Just about every professor, I’m sure you know better than I do, is making their own decision about how to use AI, what rules are around that, and maybe we can make a little more progress on that front also.

(Allyson)

And then just taking a turn from that topic. So, on April 30 of this past year, there was a clash between protesters and police on Polk Place that involved the American flag. This resulted in the detainment and arrest of student protesters and landed UNC on the front page of many national news sources. Can you just walk me through that day and some of the decisions that you made?

(Chancellor Roberts)

So that was a difficult day, I think, for everybody. Certainly not the thing that anybody wants to see happen. That was a Tuesday. And on that previous Friday, we had seen an encampment start on the Quad on Polk Place. And we had a really good dialogue with the protesters. Our student affairs folks, our dean of students, and her really capable team had been speaking with the protesters and just explaining to them that you can hang out on quad all you want, you just can’t camp on the quad. You can’t put up tents. Whenever the protesters did start to violate that policy, the student affairs folks had a conversation with them, and they complied. So, tents were put up and taken down on Friday.

At one point, they put up an awning, I think on Saturday, and student affairs asked them to take it down, and they did their noise regulations about how much amplified noise you can have on the quad. The protesters were complying with that. So, we felt really good about the dialogue that we were having with the protestors and the fact that everybody seemed to be on the same page. That changed on that Sunday afternoon when tents were put back up. At that point, there was no way the protesters couldn’t have known that that was a policy violation since they had been complying all along. And the student affairs folks noticed that the students they had been talking to throughout since Friday were no longer the people they were talking to. It seemed as though there was a new group of people who had either come in or were just a new group of delegates.

And so, it became clear to us that if they weren’t going to take the tents down, that we would need to take them down. That was made clear to the to the protesters, and we took them down on that Tuesday morning, April 30th, which was the last day of classes.

Later on, there was the protest around the flagpole that you mentioned. And I’ve been asked before whether I would do things differently, and I’ve obviously thought about it a lot. I have to say, I don’t think I would do things materially differently if I had to do it over again. Nobody told me to do it. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It seems like the right thing to do in retrospect. What I do think we could have done a better job with, and it’s an important lesson leading into this semester and what’s likely to be at least some protest activity around October 7th and around the election, is communicate a little bit better and explain to people why we made the decisions that we did. Communicate more in the run up to the protests about what our rules are and what the consequences are for breaking the rules, why we have the rules in place.

And we tried to do that. We put out a comprehensive communication at the beginning of this semester. Walking through that, we’ll put out another big communication next week in the prelude to October 7th and University Day, and there are two important Jewish holidays coming up.

And so, it could be a time of protest activity. And that’s not only something that we tolerate, it’s something we encourage. There’s a long, noble tradition of peaceful protest here at Carolina, and we support it, and we encourage it. We have some very basic, I think easy to follow, easy to understand rules. You can’t disrupt campus operations. You can’t threaten, harass, or intimidate anybody, and you can’t camp on the quad. We’re trying to make clear why we have those rules, what penalties we have in place for violating those rules. If people want to protest about any issue at any time, again, we encourage that. So, we’ll just try to communicate as best we can.

(Allyson)

Yeah, and we were talking about free speech. So, on that same note, can you share more of your thinking on what healthy free speech looks like on public college campuses like Carolina?

(Chancellor Roberts)

So, a college campus should be, and I think Carolina is a place for really robust dialogue around even sensitive topics like the conflict in Gaza.

I would hope that it would be a scholarly dialogue. That’s who we should be. A better, maybe more robust, better informed, more respectful dialogue than what you see, say, on social media. We already have social media. We don’t need to replicate social media on the Carolina quads.

What I hope we would have instead of name-calling and hurling of accusations is a robust academic discussion around even these pretty highly charged issues. Our program for public discourse has made some progress in that regard. But I think we all have a responsibility to try to model what a scholarly dialogue in which we learn from each other instead of just shouting at each other can look like.

(Allyson)

And the School for Civic Life and Leadership, specifically talking about public discourse. Can you talk to me a little bit about the program and its faculty, as well as its entire purpose?

(Chancellor Roberts)

Really exciting initiative, and I think it’s attracted a lot of national attention. We hired the new dean in March, Jed Atkins. He was chair of the classics department at Duke. He’s an expert on Cicero. He’s written three books about Cicero. And since then, he’s hired eleven . . . Jed and the school have hired eleven additional faculty members. They have backgrounds in political science, political theory, history, philosophy, classics. Extremely impressive group of folks. In fact, I’m speaking at an event for them later today, and I’ve had a chance to meet all the new faculty. And I encourage people who are skeptical about the school just to try interacting with the faculty, at least read their bios, understand what their backgrounds are and what they’re teaching, because it’s an extremely impressive group of intellectuals who are here to undertake meaningful scholarship. We have the minor up and running, three classes, heavily oversubscribed. We’ll have the major here shortly, so we’re excited about it.

(Allyson)

Yeah, we actually have John Rose now on our staff for Dialogue and Discourse. We’re very excited to have him, and we’ve heard great things from him. But also taking another shift. With the recent decision to repeal DEI offices and positions across the UNC campus, how will you ensure that all students of all backgrounds succeed and feel supported on campus?

(Chancellor Roberts)

When you say the UNC campus, it was really a UNC System policy. We’re part of a 17-campus UNC System, and at the system level, so not at the Carolina level, but at the system level, this policy was put in place to require campuses to eliminate DEI functions and report back to the system office by September 1, and we report back on a template that was given to us by the system.

So, we did that by September 1. That’s a publicly available document. I think it’s important to understand what the policy does and doesn’t do. So, it clearly does not affect really anything students say or do.

It doesn’t affect anything professors say or do in terms of their classroom activity, their research. That’s all explicitly clear. It does not affect our centers, the Black student center, the Latinx center, the LGBT center, all explicitly unaffected by the policy.

I’ve been asked previously about Project Uplift. Project Uplift is a terrific program that should be supported, and I would hope expanded. It’s been around for 50 years, not affected by the policy.

What’s affected are some staff positions that have been reassigned, and some internal training programs. I think there’s been some confusion about what’s included in the policy and what isn’t.

I hope we can make that more clear over time. But look, the broader thrust of your question is, how do we make sure that that people feel welcomed at Carolina? And we don’t have a more important challenge than that.

This is the University of North Carolina. It was founded to be the university of the people. And I would be the first to acknowledge, because it’s historical fact, that we haven’t always done as good a job of that as we could have or should have. It’s a long and complicated history over our last 230 years. But to me, that’s even more reason why we need to work as hard as we possibly can now to recruit a student body that looks like North Carolina, that reflects North Carolina.

Everyone who lives here knows how quickly our state is growing and changing, and we have an obligation to reflect that, really a moral trust with the people of the state to reflect the state as it changes and grows. We can’t just reflect it on paper.

We have to make sure that when students get here, they feel welcomed as though they belong, as though this is a place where they can flourish and thrive.

(Allyson)

Overturning of affirmative action has really hit UNC very hard. I think the recent stats just came out, and there’s dramatic lowering of students of color on campus. How are we ensuring diversity within both students and faculty on campus?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I think we need to do a much more aggressive job in outreach and in recruiting. I think of it in three categories. The outreach is part of it and going out and encouraging people not only to apply to Carolina, come to Carolina as faculty and staff members, but also trying to get more of them who are accepted to come. I’ve talked with the Alumni Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity about this. Can we call accepted students and convince them to accept their offer to come to Carolina? Nothing bugs me more than a student who gets into Carolina who then decides to go somewhere else. We could do a better job recruiting those students after they’ve been accepted.

Part of that, too, is the great story that we have to tell about access and affordability. It’s not as well-known as it should be. We have polling data that shows a lot of North Carolinians think a Carolina education is out of reach. A meaningful percentage of people think we’re a for-profit organization. At the same time, we have had flat tuition for 8 years, flat in nominal terms, meaning in real terms, it’s actually gotten less expensive by about 20 percent over those last eight years in-state tuition. We give away $200 million a year in financial aid. We’ve got these exceptional financial aid programs, including the Carolina Covenant, the Blue Sky Scholars, the Tar Heel Guarantee, we just need to get the word out about those more effectively. So as many people as possible realize that Carolina education can be for them, and it can be affordable. And then the third part is when people get here making sure they feel like they have a way to plug in and they can belong. We have almost 900 student organizations on campus. Hopefully, there’s something for just about everybody. That could be a service organization, it could be Greek life, it could be an intramural sport. And part of that, too, is just being more thoughtful about our accommodations. I met with the Muslim Student Association a couple of weeks ago to talk about serving more halal meals in the dining hall. Those are the things we need to continue focusing on to make as many students feel as welcome as possible.

(Allyson)

We mentioned Carolina’s history. The school was founded in 1789. As we both know, Carolina has an immensely complicated history, one that includes racism, enslavement, and campus violence since its establishment. Are there any initiatives or programs that you’d like to point to for students to learn from this history?

(Chancellor Roberts)

Well, I think Carolina does a pretty good job of making its history accessible to students, but it’s there if you’re interested is what I would say. As a student, you might have a better perspective on whether the orientation process does an effective job teaching students about the complexities of Carolina’s history. But we have the Commission on History, Race, and the Way Forward, which made some important recommendations that are in the process of implementation. I think our centers, like the Black Student Center that I mentioned, provide some helpful historical context. But that’s something that you never cross off your list. You never say, all right, we’ve done a good enough job providing historical context, and now we can move on to something else. That’s always going to a work in progress.

(Allyson)

Do you think it should be some mandatory course or something to learn about the history of Carolina? Because I didn’t know anything coming on campus. It was until I took a course this year that I was like, gosh, this is who the buildings are named after and so forth. Should that be required, do you think?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I try to stay away from telling the faculty what to do and mandating anything around the curriculum. It’s really not my role. That’s a question for the faculty. But I absolutely think it’s important for students to have the ability to learn as much about Carolina’s history as they’re interested in learning.

(Allyson)

And then just taking one last shift, what legacy do you hope to leave at Carolina during your tenure?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I just started. I became permanent chancellor in August when I talked about the four working groups around AI, enrollment, applied sciences, our physical master plan, the launch of the School of Civic Life and Leadership, and all the upheaval around college athletics. I think those are still things we’ll be talking about years from now. But the best thing you can say about anybody is that they left the place a little bit better than they found it. And if people are able to say that about me, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

(Allyson)

Yeah. And then my last question, which is a staple question for this podcast, what has been your favorite Carolina memory so far?

(Chancellor Roberts)

I got to tell you, there have been quite a few, but convocation, where all the new students were coming in. I had just been named permanent chancellor, and coach Erin Matson, our incredible field hockey coach, was the speaker. And just being there in the Smith Center with all the new students, feeling like a freshman myself, that was a pretty exciting day.

(Allyson)

That’s amazing. Thank you, chancellor, so much for joining me today.

(Chancellor Roberts)

Thank you so much for having me.