The guy who bets it all on AI and Bill Belichick

Lee Roberts meets me at the University of San Francisco clubhouse on a Friday morning, hours before his football team lost 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 had gone according to script.

But Roberts, the UNC chancellor, doesn’t know that yet. Now he’s in California to talk about artificial intelligence, which is forward-thinking and also — I’d hazard a guess — a welcome distraction from much of what’s going on at the 235-year-old school.

“No one will tell [students after they graduate from college]“Do the best job you can, but if you use AI, you’re going to get in trouble,” Roberts told me, leaning into his central thesis about preparing students for the real world. “And yet, we have some faculty who are effectively saying that to students right now.”

Roberts joined me among other meetings in town with AI companies because UNC has decided to make AI its north star. It’s a business bet, really. Roberts has spent three decades in finance, most recently as managing partner at a private investment firm and serving as state budget director under a Republican governor. He taught budgeting as an adjunct at Duke University, but had never worked in academic administration before becoming UNC’s interim chancellor in January of last year, a position that became permanent eight months later.

Not to mention, 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. Not to mention that last year more than 900 people signed a statement confirming that they would not recognize Roberts as chancellor when he is appointed, describing the process as a political “coronation” rather than a search. Not to mention, Belichick’s much-touted return to football is currently a 2-4 train wreck, with writings about the team’s dysfunction becoming routine fodder for sportswriters. Roberts is focused on the future.

At UNC, there is a wide range between faculty who are “leaning forward” with AI and those who are “burying their heads in the sand,” Roberts explains. It’s a diplomatic formulation of what is clearly a culture war being fought in the faculty halls of UNC and, perhaps it’s safe to assume, at other schools around the world. While one UNC professor assigns more research than students could complete without AI (“much closer to a real-world scenario,” Roberts says), others are treating chatbots like steroids. If you use it, you’re cheating.

“We have 4,000 faculty members,” Roberts says as a cable car passes by the open window next to our table. “They take pride, as they should, in their independence and independence in how they teach their classes.”

It’s like a code: tenured professors can’t be forced to do anything. So Roberts is creating “incentive-based programs” to move the ball forward, such as promoting a college dean to vice dean of artificial intelligence at the university. That person, Jeffrey Bardzell, has been a professor for more than 20 years and has “experience both in technology and as a humanitarian,” Roberts says, adding that Bardzell is “exceptionally well positioned to help the faculty as a whole move forward quickly.”

UNC is moving forward on other fronts in the meantime. In its biggest development to date, the university announced this month that it will merge two schools – the School of Data and Society Sciences and the School of Information and Library Sciences – into a single yet-to-be-named entity with AI studies at the center of the Venn diagram.

UNC is not alone in betting big on artificial intelligence. At least 14 colleges now offer bachelor’s degrees in AI, and universities like Arizona State University have made headlines for incorporating AI tools across all majors.

However, the creation of this new school has alarmed some of the school’s library science students, who wonder what will happen to their degrees, according to a report in the Daily Tar Heel, the school’s independent student newspaper. A faculty member also complained anonymously in a statement to the newspaper, saying Roberts pushed for the school without a “compelling idea” of what it would entail, adding that “the careers of faculty, staff and students at both schools are being sacrificed to Roberts’ ego.”

Implementation will be collaborative, not top-down, Roberts told me. It is also clear that this move is proactive rather than reactive. “It’s not about closing anything,” he says. “It’s not often a cost-saving move,” he continues, a possible reference to those federal research dollars, which amount to 3.5% of UNC’s total research funding.

Roberts does not underestimate the devastation of losing grants – “In many cases, [people] “They are losing their life’s work,” he admits – but he is also quick to note that 3.5% “is within our average annual variance.” He adds that he has been spending “a lot of time talking with policymakers and lawmakers in Washington about the tremendous good that federal research funding represents. We have to be especially vigilant now, when there is so much uncertainty around us.” [these dollars] It is already changing the fundamental structure of how large research universities are funded.

Naturally, it raises questions about resources in its entirety. Although UNC’s AI boost is today’s topic, I’m asking about the $10 million the school pays Bill Belichick annually as part of a five-year deal signed in January. I’m from Cleveland, Roberts told me. I remember when Belichick cut Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar, a hometown hero. The city never forgave him.

Roberts is ready for this. He says college sports are changing rapidly. Each peer organization spends at least the same amount on football; Many people spend more. Football generates revenue for 28 other sports. UNC just won its fourth national championship in women’s lacrosse, and 23rd in women’s soccer. None of this happens without football money.

“If we hired someone else and we were [down some games]”Everybody’s going to say, ‘Hey man, you could have had Bill Belichick,'” Roberts says.

In fact, the prevailing narrative around Belichick is not just about wins and losses. Even if that’s what it ultimately comes down to, multiple outlets have published stories describing the chaos within the program, with players, parents, coaches and administrators painting a picture of a legendary NFL coach whose style doesn’t translate to college students.

But Roberts doesn’t make his decisions based on “a couple of news stories,” he says. “From my perspective, Coach Belichick has done a really good job of integrating with our campus,” Roberts says. Appears in other teams’ matches. He sends pizza to fraternities on Saturday nights. “He grew up on a college campus, and his father was a Navy coach.”

Hours after our conversation, UNC would lose to Cal when wide receiver Nathan Leacock lost control of the ball while crossing into the end zone for what would have been a game-winning touchdown. I can only imagine what the immediate reaction would be in Chapel Hill.

My feeling is that Roberts will ignore it. He may never be forgiven for not having a traditional academic background, but he also couldn’t care less that it bothered some people. I note that the 900-person petition took issue with the fact that Roberts, among the top 50 universities, is the only leader with no experience in higher education administration. The petition was published in the Daily Tar Heel newspaper, which criticized Roberts’s chancellorship throughout.

“I don’t think it was 900 students,” Roberts corrects me. “I think there were 900 people, regardless of whether they were students, faculty, staff or just people out in the world, who signed the online petition.”

Ask how he felt about the whole episode. “No matter what your background is before you take a job like this, you will have a lot to learn,” Roberts says. If you are a dean, you will know nothing about “the business, financial, fiscal, financial, political, operational or real estate side of the university”. If you come from work, you will need to learn the academic side.

It’s a reasonable point. The modern university president is part CEO, part diplomat, part fundraiser, and part sports executive. It is assumed that no one arrives with all the required skills. “I think no matter what you’ve done before you take a job like this, there’s going to be a learning curve,” Roberts says.

What strikes me about Roberts is that he seems relatively unfazed. Federal funding cuts are within the normal range. Hiring Belichick is a wait-and-see situation. As for the resistance of some faculty members to artificial intelligence, it is a puzzle that must be solved.

He is also making big bets at a time when higher education is under pressure in every way. Federal funding is uncertain. The low birth rate threatens future school enrollment rates. The value of a college degree is coming into question, as more students graduate to find that the only jobs available to them are low-paying jobs they could have gotten without spending staggering amounts of money on college. Now artificial intelligence threatens to upend the entire model.

But Roberts sees opportunity where others might see a crisis. He also believes the window of opportunity is shorter than some might think. “The challenge with AI is that we have to work relatively quickly, and we also have to collaborate across academic disciplines,” he says. “And those are two things that universities have historically not been particularly good at.”

It remains to be seen whether Roberts’ game plan will work. What’s clear is that he’s betting that moving fast and turning things around is better than moving slowly and maintaining tradition at top-ranked UNC’s leadership.

“We are going to try to make Carolina the number one public university in America,” he told me.

It’s an ambitious vision, and while he achieves it, for better or worse, he sounds a lot like a Silicon Valley CEO.

To hear this interview with Roberts, listen to TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast; New episodes drop every Tuesday.