The man betting everything on AI and Bill Belichick

Summary

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 fodd...