This review of the literature offers a description of college faculty in the United States: their training, responsibilities, duties, career ladders, demographics, salaries, pressures, and current political issues. The section on training describes the doctoral degree generally, assistantship programs, post-doctoral positions, and the supply of doctoral degrees to the labor force. The section on duties looks at faculty roles in the three areas of teaching, research and service. The section on worklife examines scope, discretion and autonomy, professionalism, and academic freedom and tenure. The description of career paths looks at the early evaluation stages, promotion and tenure, characteristics of evaluation, changes over the course of a career in duties and skills, research productivity, and quantity of research produced. A section on demographics and attitudes among faculty reports national data on faculty age, composition, gender, ethnicity, degree, rank and attitudes to their jobs and institutions. The section on salary offers three tables of data and describes several broad patterns. A section on salary and other differences among faculty touches on gender, minority status, part-time status, and generational differences. A section on pressures describes typical stressors and offers information on faculty attitudes about job pressures. A section on current criticisms describes recent intense criticism of college faculty and offers a compilation of the charges against them. (Contains 35 references.) (JB)