Once a node is marked 'faculty only', can the student who marked it still read it? If so, will faculty realize that at least one student can read it, despite the 'faculty only' mark?

Yes, that's exactly the behaviour I'm looking for. The student and the faculty can read it. I don't think the faculty would have a problem with it, given the context of the site. The beauty of simple_access is that I can rename the access group "faculty and author", and the UI problem is solved. :) I had looked at the node you sent, but I can't quite figure out how to leverage that function to "override" the "owner has priveliges" part of the equation. Maybe I'm just being dense, but it sounds like I can either, implement a node specific interface, or implement a role/group specific interface. Do I store the user ID in the GID field in the node_access table? Or is it safe to fake the group membership just for that node access call? Thanks, Dave