In Linq To Sql, when updating one of my entities, Faculty, I am creating a new instance of the Faculty object, then initializing some of the properties with values
Did you try
context.Refresh(RefreshMode.OverwriteCurrentValues, faculty);
after submit changes where context is your linq2sql datacontext and faculty is the entity you want to refresh?
What about retrieving the object from the database, then changing the appropriate values, then submitting the update?