Current methods for evaluating faculty teaching fall short, and one way to address this is through campus-wide initiatives that focus on change at the level of academic units. The complex context of higher education makes meaningful teaching evaluation difficult; in particular, four sobering realities of this context must be taken into account in the design of change initiatives. Possible strategies for addressing these realities are illustrated in this article, with concrete examples from the Holistic Evaluation of Teaching Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.