New UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor to be named Friday. Will Lee Roberts keep the job?

UNC-Chapel Hill will have a new chancellor by the end of the week.

The UNC System Board of Governors is set to meet virtually Friday morning to approve the university’s next leader, bringing to a close a search process that kicked off less than five months ago.

The board will vote on system President Peter Hans’ nomination of a single finalist, chosen from group of three candidates submitted to him Monday by campus Board of Trustees.

Friday’s announcement will end the search four months earlier than Hans originally expected. The search committee changed its initial plan to continue its work into the fall semester to gather additional input from the campus community, a move that likely allowed the process to speed up considerably.

Multiple people have been interviewed for the job. But the accelerated timeline has left some students and faculty concluding that interim Chancellor Lee Roberts will likely be named to the post permanently.

Roberts, a former state budget director under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, does not have a professional background in higher education. He has held the university’s top post since former Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz left in January, resigning from the Board of Governors to assume the interim role.

Roberts, a private investment manager, has not stated publicly whether he wants the job permanently or has applied. He did not return a phone call from The News & Observer Wednesday.

Faculty, students voice concerns about search

Sue Estroff, a professor in the UNC School of Medicine and an elected member of the university’s Faculty Executive Committee, is among those who expect Roberts to be appointed.

Leaders with influence over the search did not do enough to allay concerns that Roberts was a shoo-in for the job, particularly after the state’s top Republican legislators — House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger — publicly endorsed him, she said.

Moore and Berger praised Roberts this spring for his handling of pro-Palestinian campus protests, particularly after he led university police in reattaching the American flag to the main campus flagpole when protesters tore it down.

State lawmakers do not hold authority over a chancellor search, but they — using the speaker and Senate leader’s recommendations — appoint all members of the UNC System Board of Governors and some members of the campus-level Board of Trustees.

UNC System policy gives both boards official roles in chancellor searches, with trustees recommending finalists to Hans and the Board of Governors voting to approve his selection.

Moore told reporters in May that he told Hans and former Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey that they “ought to take that interim title off and name Lee Roberts the chancellor today.” Berger said there was “no question” that Roberts should continue to serve as chancellor, permanently.

A done deal?

Since Republicans took control of the General Assembly in 2010, some groups, including the national American Association of University Professors, have accused the Board of Governors and the broader university system of being unduly influenced by conservative political connections.

Estroff said after Moore and Berger weighed in on the search, “that was it” — meaning, in her eyes, the search was done. She wondered — and asked the university’s provost on multiple times, she said — how the search would continue to attract candidates, given that some of the state’s most powerful players had voiced their opinion.

But Cristy Page, the executive dean of the UNC School of Medicine and the chair of the search committee, told reporters last week after closed-door candidate interviews that she did not think Roberts’ time as interim chancellor, nor Moore or Berger’s comments, had impacted the applicant pool.

“I feel really good that there has been a lot of outreach to people who are internal and external to North Carolina,” Page said. “And that doesn’t seem to have dissuaded people from their interest and commitment to pursuing our great university.”

UNC System policy keeps chancellor searches confidential and dictates that no names or identities of candidates, semi-finalists or finalists may be released to the public, even after a search ends. The only name officially available to the public will likely be the one who is chosen to become chancellor by Hans and is approved Friday.

Process sped up in recent weeks

Though the search process kicked off in March, it sped up considerably in recent weeks.

The search committee last week held two days of candidate interviews in Chapel Hill, on Wednesday and Thursday. Monday this week, the campus trustees met for less than an hour to hear the committee’s report and select their slate of finalists to forward to Hans.

There were signs as early as April that the search would move somewhat quicker than Hans originally anticipated when he gave the committee its charge five months ago.

Laurie Wilder, president of Parker Executive Search, the firm that led the search, said at the committee’s second meeting in April that finishing the search in December, or near the end of the year as Hans expected, would be the “worst case from a timing perspective.”

A longer timeline could expose candidates to more “risk,” particularly their names becoming public, Wilder and Page said multiple times. Keeping the search confidential and speeding it up would quell candidates’ fears about entering a search, particularly for sitting university leaders, Wilder had noted.

“So with that, and with the market and a number of things, we are paying attention to moving as quickly as possible once we start interviewing people, to limit that time that people are exposed,” Page said following the committee’s fourth meeting, on July 17.

Last month Page said the committee would no longer hold additional listening sessions in the fall, as originally planned, due to the group receiving enough feedback in the initial sessions and a stakeholder survey.

Alexander Denza and Samuel Scarborough are members of the Southern Student Action Coalition and TransparUNCy, an organization that aims to highlight political influences on higher education in the state. In an interview, they said the additional sessions being canceled is a detriment to the search process. Since the listening sessions concluded prior to Roberts’ actions during the protests, the input students provided in their session might not accurately portray their feelings about the interim chancellor, they said.

“If they were to actually hold listening sessions in the fall, they’d get an extreme amount of push back in the community,” Denza said.

The faster-than-expected timeline means the new chancellor will be announced about a week before fall classes begin on Aug. 19.

“That means that no students are going to be on campus to be able to make their voices heard on what they think of this,” Denza said.

Estroff said she hopes she is surprised by the announcement on Friday and that the university’s new leader is “someone who is of the calibre that we have had in previous chancellors,” with experience in higher education.

“Let me say that as strongly as I can: I hope I’m wrong,” Estroff said, referencing her belief that Roberts will be selected. “I hope we’re all surprised.”