Lee Roberts was named UNC-Chapel Hill’s interim chancellor on Friday morning, a widely anticipated move that sets up leadership at the flagship state university until a national search for a permanent leader is conducted.
Roberts is the co-founder of North Carolina-based SharpVue Capital and a current member of the UNC System’s Board of Governors. He most prominently served as state budget director under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory from 2014 to 2016. An alum of Duke and Georgetown universities, he’s also taught at Duke’s public policy school.
Roberts’ appointment has been rumored since news broke last month that Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz was considering a job as Michigan State University’s next president. Roberts starts as interim on January 12, and a national search will begin for a permanent chancellor after that.
The next chancellor enters a heated environment, full of political tension, uncertainty over the school’s vision, and a profound lack of trust throughout the Carolina community. Ahead of Friday’s announcement, Roberts sat down separately with three media outlets, including The Assembly, for a brief interview about how he’ll approach the challenge.
Roberts was friendly but guarded. He is largely described as smart, ambitious, wonky, and technocratically inclined. While there’s little doubt that he’s qualified to run a complicated operation, there are many questions about how he will navigate the various pressures on this new role.
The most frequent criticism from insiders is about his leadership experience. His past roles have largely been behind the scenes, focused on operations and management. UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor is among the most public and prominent positions in the state. The role has to manage relationships with legislators, donors, students, faculty, staff, and media. Roberts will need to juggle and manage a set of stakeholders who all want different things.
There’s also skepticism around his lack of UNC ties, particularly before joining the UNC System’s Board of Governors in 2021. Two of the last three UNC-Chapel Hill chancellors spent decades at the institution before taking the top job. Some see Roberts’ outsider status as an asset, but others see it as a weakness.
He’ll also face some skepticism from a liberal-leaning campus for his connections to Republicans and his professional experience in the investment world. But he has other notable connections in and beyond politics. His wife, Liza, was the founding editor of the well-known Raleigh magazine, Walter, and recently wrote a book on North Carolina art. His mother, the late journalist Cokie Roberts, won Edward R. Murrow and Emmy awards for her work at NPR where she was considered a “founding mother.” His grandfather was a Democratic U.S. House majority leader representing Louisiana, while his grandmother chaired the Democratic National Convention and spent two decades in Congress.
In the coming weeks, we’ll have much more reporting on UNC-Chapel Hill’s future. For now, here is how Roberts described his plans as interim chancellor in his own words:
On criticisms that he’s better suited to be a COO, not a CEO:
“If you think about what the best chancellors do, the skills that they bring to bear are skills that I’ve brought to bear my entire career.
They’re leading these complex organizations, they’re doing it with decisiveness and empathy and humility. They’re world class listeners, they’re building great teams. They’re making sure that the students and the faculty and the staff have the resources that they need to do their jobs. They’re not telling the experts how to do their jobs, they’re making sure that the place is as welcoming as possible, and everyone feels like they belong there. And they’re representing the organization to the broader world in a complex and challenging political and media environment.
I think everything I’ve done since I graduated from law school 30 years ago has helped train me for that.”
On who his boss is, within a complicated governance system:
“I don’t think there’s any ambiguity about the governance situation. The chancellor reports to the system president [Peter Hans].”
On how he’ll work with UNC-Chapel Hill’s board:
“The Board of Trustees is a group of really committed, really impressive Carolina alums who care a lot about the future of the institution and have got a lot of really good ideas. So who wouldn’t want that input?”
On his top priority for the school:
“People talk about Carolina as one of the top five public universities in the country and it’s clearly that by any objective metric that you want to look at.
But I think the future belongs to North Carolina as a state. We are this incredibly dynamic, interesting, fast growing place where people want to move–from around the country and around the world. And there’s no more important piece of that than Carolina. There’s no reason why Carolina shouldn’t aspire to be, head and shoulders, the best public university in America.
Set that as a goal and be thought of not just as one of the best, but as clearly the best. It’s not easy to do and it’s not going to happen overnight. But I think when you’re talking about vision, that should be our objective.”
On why he’s taking this job:
“I care a lot about the state. I care a lot about higher education. I care a lot about public service. I’ve raised a family here, I built a business here. As I say, I think the future belongs to North Carolina.
I’m gonna be speaking at Winston-Salem State’s December graduation. One of the fun parts about being on the Board of Governors is that you get to go around and offer greetings from the Board of Governors, congratulations to the graduates. I’ve done it at Winston-Salem State before.
One thing I always say to the students: I hope you’ll spend your careers in North Carolina and raise your families here, and I know that a lot of you will. But for those of you who are on the fence, I believe that the future belongs to North Carolina, and if I were graduating from college anywhere else, I’d be trying to figure out how to get here as quickly as possible. And I believe that.
We don’t have a more important institution than Carolina when it comes to the future of the state and the health of the state.”
On his interest in higher education and public service:
“I’ve served on the Board of Governors. When I served in the budget office, we had the first general obligation bond issue in 15 years, the $2 billion ConnectNC bond issue, and half of that went to higher education. I’ve served on the Community College Board. I served on the board of visitors at the Sanford School at Duke. I’ve had a consistent theme of being involved in and caring about higher education.
I grew up caring a lot about public service. It sometimes sounds a little naive or corny when you talk about it, but my grandparents were members of Congress, my parents were journalists, they talked about the importance of giving back to the institutions that our country depends on. And I know some people will roll their eyes at it, but it’s meaningful to me.”
On the early criticisms of him and his lack of UNC ties:
“What I’ve heard mostly so far is concern over where I went to college. I understand the instinctive reaction, but I think any concern that I can’t adequately do the job because of that is frankly a little bit silly.
I’m grateful to Duke for first bringing me here when I was 17 years old. I got a great liberal arts education there, but I am confident that I can do this job with the best interests of Carolina and only the best interests of Carolina at heart.”
On the changes happening in athletics nationally:
“So athletics obviously is crucial to the mission. It’s important for fundraising, it’s important for affinity, it teaches all kinds of important lessons about leadership and teamwork and integration. I also think that at a time when, nationally, we’re starved for things that bring us all together– that we can all get behind–college sports are one of the few things that serve that role. And so to me that alone would be reason to support and encourage college sports.
But it’s obviously in a period of significant change. I’m not sure there’s been another period when college sports are so unstable. And so the role of whoever’s leading Carolina, and the rest of the leadership team at Carolina, is to make sure that when the dust settles, Carolina is better off.”
On the push to explore moving Carolina from the ACC to the SEC or another conference:
“It’s an important financial question. It’s an important cultural question. I think it’s going to take a lot of time from everyone involved going forward.”
On the effort he helped lead to change the UNC System’s funding model:
“The previous funding model was broken. All it really did was incentivize the growth of student credit hours, which didn’t really align with the board’s strategic vision for the system, it didn’t align with the campuses’ own strategic visions.
It was especially harmful to smaller campuses in an era of declining enrollment, or at least not rapidly growing enrollment. And so what the funding model does is just realign incentives, and it gives the campuses a way to grow their resources, without having growth in student credit hours as the only tool. And it aligns incentives with the strategic direction of the system and the state.”
On the funding model’s performance-based elements, and how it applies to Carolina:
“My candid answer is that the funding model probably does not apply as well to Carolina as it does to some other schools in the system, because one size doesn’t fit all. We knew that when we first designed it, right now everyone does have the same performance metrics.
Their targets are different but the metrics that they’re judged on and the performance weighting calculation are all the same. Carolina just is different in lots of important ways from other schools in the system, and there’s been a conversation underway about looking at that.”
On tension over whether Carolina is too far to the left or right as an institution:
“It’s crucial that Carolina represents the whole state. It doesn’t just represent part of the state. It doesn’t belong to any particular group. It belongs to everybody in North Carolina.”
On how he’ll approach the first few months of the role:
“First is the Hippocratic oath, do no harm. The second is to ensure a smooth transition. Third is to make sure that the students and the faculty and staff have what they need, [to] listen to them. And fourth is–and I think anybody would come in with this hope–for as long as the interim period lasts, to leave it at least a little bit better than how you found it.”
On whether he’ll apply for the permanent role:
“I haven’t crossed that bridge yet. I haven’t even started the interim role yet.”
Kyle Villemain is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Assembly. He is a former speechwriter who grew up in the Triangle and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.