Institutional support for faculty development within higher education has increasedgreatly at many colleges and universities over the last 10–15 years. In the 1970s, andcontinuing through much of the 1980s, the big concern among top administrators about facultyseemed to be that too many were tenured. Heavily tenured departments were seen by many as asource of stagnation and low productivity. Thus, rather than emphasizing programs forfaculty development, many institutions sought ways to insure that faculty would retire. But,as the number of actual and foreseeable faculty retirements ballooned in the 1990s, a newconcern arose: recruiting and retaining high quality faculty members. Faculty developmentbecame trendy. Helping new faculty members be the best they could be made sense toadministrators and trustees.