In spite of extensive activity in faculty development around the country, no replicable programs have been developed, no viable conceptual models have been formulated, and no guidelines to assist program planners have emerged. Whatever evaluative information has been offered to attest to the results of programs has usually been based on unreliable, inferential, subjective, and unsystematically collected data. Faculty development has become an end in itself, and if the current messy state continues it is destined to fulfill the prediction of many and become just another fad. What most so-called faculty development experts and theorists seem to forget is that higher education is a system. If the school as a system does not achieve its objective--if the students are not learning adequately--the school must be redesigned until it does. Two comprehensive efforts at professional development serve as examples of such redesign: the Center for Professional Development, established in the office of the chancellor of the California State University and Colleges and encompassing a variety of programs on six campuses; and an institutional change project at the UCLA School of Dentistry. The implementation was different in the two situations, but each project treated the school as an entity within which functions can be reorganized. (Author/MSE)