Perry A. Holloway is the pseudonym of a professor at a public university in California who shared thoughts on Inside Higher Ed about "Is Fundamental Change Really 'Inevitable'?" The comments section of this article is especially useful in gauging various campus perspectives.

Are faculty really obstacles to needed change or are they performing an important function by opposing administrative initiatives?

The budget woes seem to many commentators to be an inarguable reason for “fundamental change” in education, but is money really a sufficient excuse for reorganizing and perhaps thereby weakening an effective system of higher education that has been the envy of the world? Further, do today’s temporary budget problems really reflect a permanent inability to fund higher education in the future, a disinclination to educate students in the ways that have been traditional in the past or a dissatisfaction with the quality of prior education? …

A great deal of the faculty resistance to change occurs because many faculty regard these faddish initiatives, along with the emphasis on assessment, as a waste because they divert resources from the classroom. When tenure-track lines are replaced by adjuncts and faculty are denied lab space, travel funding, or even market-average pay, they come to doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances that the institution cares about quality education.

From the comments:

I teach at a similar institution and can vouch for the fact that what he describes goes on elsewhere as well. The administration pushes the latest pedagogical fad while faculty ignore them and continues to teach using nineteenth-century methods (but with PowerPoint substituting for blackboards). A plague on both houses, I say!

Of course there are exceptions--small colleges dedicated to student learning, like Alverno College--but while I have only my own institution to judge from, I doubt that it is unique.

One way to test this hypothesis would be to ask at your next faculty meeting, "has anyone read any good books on teaching and learning lately?" I know at my university that would be the only time in departmental history that there was total silence at a faculty meeting.

Think about it for a minute: how many professors would give a conference paper without bothering to read up on any of the secondary literature? I mean, you'd be laughed out of the profession. But in universities across the country faculty can walk into classrooms with out the slightest grasp of the research on teaching and learning.