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Efforts to mitigate bias in faculty hiring processes are well-documented in the literature. Yet, significant barriers to the hiring of racially minoritized and White women in many STEM fields remain. An underreported barrier to inclusive hiring is assessment of risk. Guided by theory from behavioral economics, social psychology, and decision-making, we examine the inner workings of five faculty search committees to understand how committee members identified and assessed risk with particular attention to assessments of risk that became intermingled with social biases. Committees identified and assessed five risks, including candidate interest, candidate disciplinary expertise, candidate competence, candidate collegiality, and the timing and oversight of the search process itself. We discuss implications of risk identification and assessment for effective and inclusive searches. 

Although research has revealed many factors that predict faculty turnover, the literature is often limited by using intent to leave as a proxy for actual turnover, and further by consolidating faculty who leave institutions with faculty who leave the occupation. We resolve these limitations and advance the faculty mobility literature by studying faculty who actually left their higher education institution for both academic and non-academic jobs. Drawing on a survey of 773 departing faculty respondents, we employed structural topic modeling and logistic regression to understand whether or not academic and non-academic leavers had statistically different reasons for leaving. Structural topic modeling revealed 12 dominant reasons why faculty leave, but none of these reasons were unique to those who left academia. Regression results show that gender, tenure status, and salary increase were significant drivers of leaving the academic profession. We provide implications for future studies of faculty departure and for faculty retention.