In April 2024, as anti-Israel protests overtook the nation’s campuses, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s then-interim chancellor Lee Roberts made headlines with a viral gesture. After a group of protesters removed the American flag and replaced it with the Palestinian flag at the campus’s quad, Roberts walked to the flagpole with campus police officers to raise the Stars and Stripes. The moment blew up on social media, portraying Roberts as a bold leader, likely cementing his permanent appointment later that year.
UNC Chapel Hill had already led the way on several key reforms. Its Board of Trustees adopted an institutional neutrality policy. It also created the School of Civic Life and Leadership, aimed at cultivating civil discourse and other habits of good citizenship in students. Roberts was widely expected to pick up the torch.
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But nearly two years into Roberts’s appointment, the university serves as a case study in stalled reform as it continues to suffer from many of the maladies afflicting higher education––from questionable course requirements to senior leadership committed to the “social-justice university.”
Under the microscope, some of UNC Chapel Hill’s key reforms look flimsy in execution. Last year, the UNC System general counsel told all campuses to end any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) course requirements, citing a Trump administration executive order. Chapel Hill took credit for making this change—without actually changing anything. It simply sped up the rollout of its previously planned IDEAS in Action core curriculum, which only nominally complies with the directive.
Chapel Hill’s new core curriculum included “Difference, Power, and Inequality” as a “focus capacity,” meaning every student would be required to take one course under the theme. Such courses include “Queering China,” “Global Whiteness,” and “Feminist Geographies.” When the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal highlighted this sleight of hand, the university simply renamed the focus capacity to “Power and Society,” while maintaining its long list of identity-centered courses.
This appears to be part of a pattern. In 2024, Chapel Hill closed its primary Diversity and Inclusion Office ahead of many other schools. But the university retained its former chief diversity officer, Leah Cox, as vice provost. A career diversity administrator, Cox had run UNC’s diversity operations at a time when many colleges were seeking to remake themselves according to vast and legally fraught social-justice plans.
When the UNC System Board of Governors rolled out its “Equality Within the University of North Carolina” policy, Chapel Hill tapped Cox herself—its former DEI chief—to lead the working group overseeing the university’s compliance with the new anti-DEI mandate. It was, in effect, putting the fox in charge of fortifying the henhouse. Then last summer, the university made Cox interim vice provost for enrollment, a position that oversees all admissions and financial aid—a bold move for a university whose name is forever linked to the Students for Fair Admissions decision.
Many other Chapel Hill senior administrators have remained committed to a progressive brand of social justice. Late last year, Chancellor Roberts hired as provost Magnus Egerstedt, the former dean of engineering at UC Irvine. Egerstedt has a track record of bolstering equity policies. According to a civil rights complaint filed by the Equal Protection Project, Egerstedt’s school established explicit racial quotas for admissions and faculty hiring. He also personally served on the Anti-Racism Task Force, and his school’s “equity in engineering” page included a deep dive on critical race theory, which asserted that “white privilege” results in “false ideas of meritocracy.”
Egerstedt has already clashed with the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. Earlier this month, the board moved to block his attempt to recruit Kiran Asher, a self-described “postcolonial, marxist [sic], feminist,” as a tenured professor of gender studies. Asher has not published a book in 17 years. Her recruitment raises questions about the senior leadership’s hiring priorities.
UNC’s faculty hiring is overseen in part by Egerstedt’s top deputy, Giselle Corbie, the senior vice provost for faculty affairs. Corbie has argued that racism is “the fabric of our country.” She devotes much of her scholarship to arguing for race-conscious health policies, as in her 2021 article titled “Vaccine Hesitancy Is a Scapegoat for Structural Racism.” She has openly questioned the concept of merit and decried the “fallacy of meritocracy”—concerning beliefs, given her oversight of faculty hiring. Last year, former Department of Education official Adam Kissel analyzed her record and concluded she is unfit to oversee faculty hiring.
Such personnel decisions are not confined to the provost’s office. Chancellor Roberts’s chief of staff, Christi Hurt, previously served as director of the Carolina Women’s Center, a campus hub for “efforts and initiatives related to women and gender equity.” Under her leadership, one of the center’s programs, the Moxie Project, used public resources to place undergraduates in summer internships with “reproductive justice” activist organizations such as Lillian’s List of North Carolina and Women AdvaNCe.
Back on campus, Hurt’s center promoted undergraduate programming such as “Womyn’s Issues Now” and “Orgasm? Yes, Please!” For “Women’s History Month,” the center celebrated the life of Angela Davis, a Soviet apologist who infamously provided the firearm used to murder a California judge.
In short: despite reform-oriented policies at the board level, UNC’s former DEI czar oversees the admissions office; a campus gender activist runs the chancellor’s office; and an outspoken critic of meritocracy oversees faculty affairs, under the supervision of a provost whose prior institution advertised explicit racial quotas until a civil rights organization called it out.
UNC administrators seem out of step with the Board of Trustees’ vision for reform. But there’s little the board can do now: in 2024, Peter Hans, president of the UNC System, revoked the board’s power to veto senior administrative appointments. This means that key appointments, like that of the new provost, Magnus Egerstedt, are in the hands of Roberts and Hans.
Senior appointments influence every aspect of university life at a level mere policy cannot touch—a reality illustrated by two recent incidents. In April, James Orr, the recently hired senior vice provost for undergraduate success, said that he planned to “investigate” a student group for making a satirical video that some students deemed racist. Orr backed down only after the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression intervened.
In the same month, the university honored one of its student activists with an award for the senior who has made the “most outstanding contribution” to the university through leadership of a student club. This Chancellor’s Award went to the founder of an activist group called TransparUNCy, which was created to fight “right-wing attack[s] on equity and justice in higher education.” TransparUNCy’s now-award-winning activism has notably included promoting the “Walk Out for the West Bank” demonstration. The protest quickly descended into a riot, which disrupted classes and led to extensive property damage across campus, including defacement of the ROTC building.
Other campus leaders have simply tried to hide the facts. When the Oversight Project requested syllabi and course materials for 74 Carolina courses through a public records request, Chancellor Roberts’s administration refused outright. The state university system office then required public disclosure of syllabi. But as the Martin Center reports, administrators are allowing professors to hide course content using a loophole in the disclosure rule.
Lee Roberts’s viral moment at the flagpole was a commendable symbolic gesture—but only symbolic. Real reform requires vigilance, follow-through, and leadership on the ground. Time will tell, but for now there’s trouble in Tar Heel country.