Q&A: Chancellor Lee Roberts reflects on his interim term and plans for the upcoming year

After being elected UNC’s 13th chancellor, Chancellor Lee Roberts sat down with DTH University Editor Ananya Cox to discuss his experience as interim chancellor and plans for this upcoming year. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

DTH: Why would you consider yourself qualified to be UNC’s chancellor?

Lee Roberts: It's true that I don't have traditional academic experience, but I do think I have relevant experience, and my hope is that the work ahead allows me to combine my background in business and finance and management and budgeting with the extraordinary talent that's already here. 

DTH: Moving from the interim to permanent chancellor position, do you have any specific plans for this year? 

LR: We'll be taking a look at how we deploy AI, both internally and for our research priorities. The state has grown very rapidly and every year we enroll a decreasing percentage of North Carolina's graduating high school seniors. Should that continue? If not, how do we grow? Not everyone thinks of us as an engineering school, but we've got about 170 faculty teaching engineering subjects right now, and we've got superb programs in applied physical sciences, in biomedical engineering, in data science and in Environmental Engineering, very strong student demand for those programs, very strong employer demand for those students. And so the question is, should they grow? We have a series of new capital needs as we always do, including our Translational Research Building, including the Porthole Alley project. We've got a long list. 

We're also excited to get the School of Civic Life and Leadership off the ground. New Dean off to an extremely strong start, has hired nine new faculty members starting by Sept. 1, all with exceptional backgrounds. Also, everything that's happening in college athletics. It's obviously a time of significant change and upheaval, and our job is to make sure that when the dust settles, Carolina is better off.

DTH: During pro-Palestine protests on April 30, counterprotesters were heard saying identity-based slurs and seen committing acts of physical violence. You shook hands with many people who were part of that group. Tell me about why you did that, and do you approve of the actions of those students and community members?

LR: There's obviously no place for slurs or hate speech, let alone violence, on this campus. We not only support student protest, we encourage student protests. We want our students to be engaged and passionate and active in the world, and we have some very reasonable, I think, easy to follow, time, place and manner restrictions, and rules about protests. 

We ask that you not vandalize our historic buildings. You can't turn the quad into your private campground. There's a long history of and noble history of protest here at Carolina, and we want that to continue. I think people want this to be a place where you don't carry the day by shouting the loudest or posting the most provocative things on social media or breaking the most rules. Those of us who are in positions of responsibility have an obligation to try to encourage scholarly dialogue around issues that are as sensitive and as fraught as the conflict in Gaza. As far as shaking hands, I'll shake hands with anybody who comes up to me and asks to shake my hand. It doesn't represent an endorsement or even knowledge of anything that they did.

DTH:  Some protesters were suspended after the events of April 30, with some served after the fact. With the kind of behavior we discussed, do you think counterprotesters should face consequences for their actions?

LR: Certainly I think people should face consequences for violence or for breaking University conduct policies, obviously for breaking the law.

DTH: Have any of the counterprotestors faced consequences?

LR: I don't know one way or the other.

DTH: Looking back on April 30, would you choose to handle things differently? 

LR: I don't think that I would have done anything differently with respect to what happened at the flagpole. Nobody told me to do it. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and in retrospect, it still seems like the right thing to have done. I do think we could have done a better job with communication, with explaining why we did what we did, why we felt the actions that we took were necessary.

DTH: There's fear around police and police intervention on campus. Where do you think that feeling is coming from and are you planning to do anything to address it?

LR: I can only answer that by backing up and taking you through what happened. Encampments started on Friday, the protesters at several points during the day started putting up tents. Clear violation of Student Conduct Policy. Student Affairs told them that it was a violation, they took the tents down. Through the weekend, whenever there was a violation of the Student Conduct Policy, the Student Affairs folks talked to them and the protesters complied. The situation changed on Sunday afternoon when the protesters began putting the tents back up. The Student Affairs folks noticed that the people they had been talking to throughout the last couple of days weren't the same people that they were talking to now. It seemed clear to us that the protesters had decided to force a confrontation, and that's what led to the decision to clear the encampment, which entailed the arrests. Even once we made that decision, nobody got arrested who didn't want to be arrested. All you had to do was walk away, and that's very clear on the video. If you want to be arrested, you can make that happen 100 percent of the time. And we've seen that happen at universities across the country. I've talked to multiple other presidents and chancellors who all had their own ways of handling pro-Palestine protests, and they all ended with arrests. If your objective is to be arrested, you can raise the stakes until the administration has no choice. 

DTH: What is your perspective on DEI at UNC? Is it necessary, what purpose does it serve and what is the impact of taking it away?

LR: Where it stands now is the system office has promulgated guidance for implementation of the DEI policy, introducing that, and we have to report back to the system office on Sept. 1, along with every other UNC system school, and we report back on a template that's been given to us by the system office. We'll be ready when the time comes, but I can't preview for you now what those changes are going to entail. Everybody who lives here knows how quickly this state is growing and changing, and we have an obligation here, at Carolina, to reflect that. And we're going to continue to do that. We have a range of tools at our disposal to do that, and that includes access and affordability. It includes outreach, going out around the state and making sure that as many students as possible know that Carolina can be a place for them. And then we not only have to reflect the state on paper, we need to ensure that when students arrive here, they feel welcome, they feel as though they belong, they feel as though this is a place where they can thrive and flourish.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misspelled Porthole Alley as portable Valley. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for this error.

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