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Enhancing the cultural diversity of faculty has emerged as a prominent issue in the 1990's. While Black, Hispanic, and American Indians have made incremental gains in terms of their representation in majority institutions, they remain clustered in the lower ranks of the faculty and generally take longer to achieve tenure. Efforts to increase the representation of minority faculty have focused on intensified recruitment, with less attention paid to further career development once a minority individual has achieved faculty status. The research presented herein explores the evaluation, promotion and tenure process of a Research I university to determine the structural and ideological barriers to minority faculty advancement. The research focuses on concepts of merit, excellence, and quality that form the cornerstones to evaluation standards, and the values, attitudes and behavioral expectations that underlie those standards. Using critical theory as the conceptual framework that drives the inquiry, the findings indicate that the pervasive ideology of merit, being universalistic in nature, does not easily accommodate diversity and trivializes racial, class, and gender issues while perpetuating a system of structured inequality.