‘The future belongs to Carolina’

As Lee H. Roberts’ first full academic year as Carolina’s chancellor draws to a close, The Well asked him to reflect on that experience as well as how the University is adjusting to the current uncertain climate for higher education.

What has your first full academic year as chancellor been like?

I continue every day to be amazed by all of the remarkable things happening on this campus. The best part of my job is that I get to learn something new every day, meet somebody new every day. It’s both gratifying and rewarding but also reminds you of the responsibility that we all have to make sure that we’re doing our best to help Carolina thrive and grow.

What was the highlight of the year for you?

A chancellor gets to do all kinds of fun and interesting things, and I particularly enjoy every opportunity I have to be with students. I have to say, my single best memory of the academic year was having the opportunity to be on the field in Cary with our women’s soccer team when we won our 23rd national championship.

A flurry of executive orders and other changes in federal policy this year have impacted Carolina’s federal funding, the safety of international students, even what research faculty can conduct and how they can talk about it. Talk about the challenges of leading the University in the current climate and how you’re addressing them.

There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty in higher education generally, and we continue to make adjustments in reaction to federal policy dynamics, and I expect that to continue.

We spend a lot of time advocating for Carolina with policymakers, both in Raleigh and in Washington. We do that directly and through the UNC system, through the AAU and the APLU. We’re always making the case for the great work that is happening here at Carolina and the great good that federal research funding represents — not just in terms of the remarkable scientific breakthroughs that federal funding enables but also the thousands of jobs that it supports.

What is your message to Carolina alumni who are concerned about their alma mater in the current climate?

First of all, I’d say to our alumni that it never stops being a great day to be a Tar Heel. We not only want your involvement and support. We need it. We want you to keep showing up for Carolina. We want you engaged in the life of our campus. We especially welcome your engagement with our students, which is a win for everybody. The students love connecting with alumni who have traveled a career path that they’re interested in, and the University wants greater engagement with alumni. I have yet to talk to an alum who hasn’t found engagement with our students tremendously rewarding.

You have talked about ambitious goals like increasing enrollment and positioning Carolina as the best public university, head and shoulders above the rest. Are you recalibrating those goals now?

In no way whatsoever. Our goals remain ambitious. We believe we have the opportunity to come through disruption and dislocation even stronger. And we want people to say, when it comes to American public universities, that there’s Carolina and then there’s everybody else.

What are your priorities going forward?

Our strategic priorities remain what I outlined at my installation and have reinforced since then:

• Making sure that we have a robust strategy for artificial intelligence in terms of our research efforts, operationally and in the classroom
• Increasing and augmenting our capacity in engineering
• Continuing to increase our undergraduate enrollment in a measured and intentional way in service to the state
• Making sure that the physical master plan of the campus reflects our needs and priorities

We also remain focused on the rapid changes underway in college athletics and on continuing to build our School of Civic Life and Leadership.

What makes you so optimistic about Carolina’s future?

If there’s one thing that our status as the nation’s oldest public university should give us, it’s the confidence to know that we can come through any set of circumstances and emerge stronger on the other side. We have an enormously resilient organization. We’ve been through world wars, pandemics, depressions, a civil war, and Carolina’s always emerged stronger. I couldn’t be more confident that our best days are yet to come.

We’re fortunate to be in a strong, rapidly growing state that has provided exceptional support to the University of North Carolina via a broad bipartisan consensus going back decades. We’re one of only a small handful of universities that has a Triple-A credit rating. Our enrollment demand continues to climb very strongly, up over 30% just in the last two years. The future belongs to Carolina.