When Sheneka M. Williams entered her doctoral program in K-12 educational leadership and policy at Vanderbilt University, the former high-school social-studies teacher was determined to become a school superintendent. She became a faculty member instead, and set her sights on breaking into university administration.

“It was a natural progression for me to think about leadership once I became a professor,” says Ms. Williams, now an associate professor in the department of lifelong education, administration, and policy at the University of Georgia. “I just kept thinking, How can I most affect change in higher education? In a leadership role.”

Ms. Williams is among nine faculty members at Georgia in a 2016-2017program that is designed to groom women for leadership positions. She spoke with The Chronicle about her administrative experience so far, what universities should do to help professors think seriously about leadership, and why balancing scholarship and administrative work is so important to her. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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There has been no shortage of predictions about what to expect under the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. But any forecast of how a man with no experience in elected office, no demonstrated interest in the process of policy making, and a record of contradictory and dishonest pronouncements will govern should be read with caution.

Anticipating Mr. Trump on higher-education policy may be especially fruitless. An October speech in which he sketched out a few higher-ed ideas was greeted with surprise — he had been almost silent on the topic until that late stage of the campaign. Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, the billionaire charter-school advocate Betsy DeVos, has no background in higher education. That’s not unusual for education secretaries, but it means that her selection provides little additional insight into where the administration might go on higher ed.

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Facts and figures are like cow pastures. Unless you squint, you can’t always tell how full of bullshit they are.

Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West, a pair of scientists at the University of Washington, think it’s time to arm students with boots and shovels. They have published the outline of a course, titled “Calling Bullshit,” which would try to teach the skills how to spot bad data and misleading graphs at a time when bending statistics has become a popular art form.

“Pending approval from the administrative powers-that-be at the University of Washington, we hope to offer the seminar in the near future,” they wrote on a website they built for the course. “In the meantime, connoisseurs of bullshit may enjoy the course syllabus, readings, and case studies that we have lovingly curated.”

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Texas higher education officials have been mostly silent on a controversial piece of state legislation that would restrict bathroom use by transgender individuals on public campuses, even as the law could override existing policies and conflict with federal guidance.

The Texas legislation, introduced last week as Senate Bill 6, is similar to North Carolina’s widely protested “bathroom bill,” which, after it passed, prompted numerous organizations to pull events — including academic gatherings and intercollegiate athletic competitions — from that state. The Texas bill would require state agencies, including higher education agencies, to put policies in place restricting transgender people’s use of multiple-occupancy bathrooms and changing facilities except as consistent with their biological gender assigned at birth.

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Is billionaire libertarian investor Charles Koch using money with strings attached to co-opt the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a supporter of historically black colleges and universities? Or are the two parties strange bedfellows united by a surprisingly common purpose?

Those questions were debated Thursday after the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a national group supporting public and private HBCUs, announced a $25.6 million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries. The fund is using the money, which will be disbursed over five years, to launch a new Center for Advancing Opportunity that will focus on education, criminal justice, entrepreneurship and other issues affecting what it calls fragile communities. The center will create think tanks on HBCU campuses, establish scholarships, set up graduate fellowships and make grants to faculty members.

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Many professors laugh off their reviews at RateMyProfessors — after all, “hotness,” one of the site’s metrics (connoted by a chili pepper), doesn’t really translate to tenure or promotion. Yet some research suggests that, like it or not, the site’s ratings correlate with ratings professors earn on their institutions’ student evaluations of teaching.

Other research suggests those more formal student evaluations of teaching are unreliable, as well. Yet colleges and universities still use them, often to inform high-stakes personnel decisions.

So a new study of 7.9 million ratings on RateMyProfessors claiming to provide “further insight into student perceptions of academic instruction and possible variables in student evaluations” is at least interesting.

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A few years ago, James H. Tatum and his colleague at Dartmouth College William Cook published a book that was a real eye=opener. African American Writers and Classical Tradition, published by the University of Chicago Press, took an in-depth look at the work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Rita Dove and others to show that “African-American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures,” while at the same time adapting and transforming African cultural traditions.

Since many of the works that had the greatest influence on those writers had their roots in Greece and Rome, the book was a wake-up call for us classicists. But while it was warmly received and won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, it has not yet led to a strong effort to answer such questions as “What about the next generation of African-American writers, thinkers, leaders? As college students, will they have in-depth access to the literature that proved so empowering to their predecessors?”

Access to serious study of the literature and experience of ancient Greece and Rome, long the core of a liberal education, is now severely limited for all students in the United States — whatever their ethnicity, socioeconomic status or color. No more than one college student in seven attends an institution with a department or program in the ancient Greek and Latin classics. For an African-American student the opportunities are likely to be even more restricted.

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Aday after the election of Donald J. Trump as president, fliers seeking help to fight “White Genocide” appeared around North Carolina State University, including at distribution points for The Nubian Message, the campus newspaper for black students.

Stephanie Tate, the paper’s editor in chief, felt targeted by the fliers, which asked people if they were “sick of the blatant anti-white propaganda spread by SJWs [social-justice warriors] and the elite.”

College campuses have experienced an uptick in racist incidents since the presidential election, whether fliers or graffiti or physical violence.

Her newspaper wrote about the fliers, but Ms. Tate wanted to make a statement as well. In an open letter to the stranger who distributed the fliers, she wrote, “I’ve received your message, and now, here’s mine.”

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Introduction to Psychology is about to begin. A student in the front row of the studio audience cues her 23 classmates to give her professors a rousing cheer. Cameras are rolling as the rest of the class — all 910 of them — tune in from their dorm rooms, coffee shops, and study rooms at the University of Texas flagship campus.

Over the next 75 minutes, they’ll watch a “weather report” that maps personal stereotypes by regions of the country (red zones splashed across parts of the Northeast mark areas of high neuroticism), and listen to an expert flown in from Stanford University discuss what someone’s Facebook “likes” reveal about her personality.

They’ll participate in a lab exercise that matches students from the studio audience with their taste in music and groan when the burly guy who looks like a country music fan actually favors Lady Gaga. They’ll take a pop quiz and watch a video clip of their professor snooping around someone’s office for keys to his personality.

Welcome to a version of the giant intro class that’s almost guaranteed to keep students awake.

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The academic job market is bleak, as most certainly all of you reading this are well aware. Over the summer, Gawkergathered some personal stories to highlight just how bad things are out there. One adjunct wrote about how they work at Starbucks to make ends meet, while another realized the janitor at their institution makes more than they do.

This conversation in popular media reveals how out of touch those with tenure often are regarding the future of their students in the academy.

I work in the field of international relations, and a couple of pieces published over at Foreign Policy made the rounds a few months ago about what those of us on the other side should do on our journey to the ever-elusive tenure-track job. First was the piece about how to get tenure. Then some women academics pointed out how gender also factors into the experience of seeking tenure in the academy.

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