Teachers' views of education, their students, and their disciplines were assessed based on interviews with 20 faculty members from a small liberal arts college. The interviews were content analyzed, and the relationships between epistemological beliefs, course objectives, and views of student difficulties (e.g., skill deficiencies, personality) were examined. Interview protocols were coded by two rates, and the epistemological assumptions were categorized, following the Perry scheme, as dualistic, multiplistic, relativistic, or committed. Educational objectives were coded as knowledge of facts, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Disciplinary division was found to be related to educational objectives, while epistemological assumptions were found to be related to perceptions of student difficulty. Teachers attributions of the causes for student difficulties were as follows: effort (30 percent), personality characteristics (30 percent), talent (40 percent), study skills (55 percent), and concreteness (45 percent). Teachers who viewed the world in terms of absolute truths, attributed the difficulties of their students to the relatively stable causes of talent and personality. (SW)