As the University of North Carolina begins its formal search for a permanent president, a likely top candidate is the former head of the state-owned medical system, which is now being investigated over turmoil at its children’s hospital during his tenure.

Dr. William L. Roper, who since January has been interim president of the university, was chief executive of UNC Health Care when doctors at the institution’s Chapel Hill children’s hospital warned administrators that their young heart patients seemed to be dying at higher-than-expected rates or faring poorly after surgery.



An investigation published in May by The New York Times gave a detailed look inside the institution in 2016 and 2017, when cardiologists — captured on secret audio recordings provided to The Times — grappled with whether to keep sending patients to their own hospital for surgery and pressed administrators to provide mortality data they said they had not been able to get for several years. Since the article ran, UNC Health Care has temporarily suspended the most complex heart surgeries at the hospital — a measure some of the doctors urged years earlier.

Dr. Roper, 71, said in a recent interview with The News & Observer in Raleigh that he and other top-ranking hospital officials had been “very much involved” in an internal investigation of the pediatric heart surgery program in 2016. UNC Health Care has said it determined at the time that the doctors’ concerns were “unfounded.” Dr. Roper has repeatedly declined to speak to The Times.