Between July 1, 2000 and July 1, 2001, 18 faculty members, including five full professors, will have submitted their resignations.
Provost Jeremiah Ostriker said this turnover is normal.
"The only way to prevent other universities from luring away our faculty is to have faculty that no one wants. [That other universities seek Princeton's professors] is a sign of a wonderful faculty," he said.
Ostriker added that the resignations only account for approximately 2 percent of the over 800 faculty employed by the University.
Of the faculty who have left or plan to leave this year, five are full professors: politics professor Stephen Holmes, physics professors Gordon Cates and Lisa Randall, Wilson School professor Jennifer Hochschild and philosophy professor Sarah Broadie.
Many of the professors who left for other institutions took offers from professional schools.
Holmes, who began teaching at Princeton in 1997, is now at New York University Law School.
"At this stage in my career, [it is] essential to be at a law school," said Holmes, who taught both undergraduate and graduate level classes on democratic theory, nationalism and state-building while at Princeton.
"The absence of a Princeton law school is one of the few drawbacks of a university which is great in almost ever other dimension," she said.
Cates, who co-invented a new technique for magnetic resonance imaging in the early 1990s, said he decided to leave Princeton to pursue research opportunities at the University of Virginia's medical school. He added he also liked the setting in Charlottesville.
A change in scenery and the increased academic opportunities professional schools offer also appealed to Hochschild, who now teaches at Harvard University.
There, Hochschild — who won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship last April after teaching at Princeton for 19 years — splits her time between the government and African-American studies departments.

"There were only a very few universities that I would have considered leaving Princeton for — Harvard is an enormously exciting place, with professional schools that are important for my work," she said.
Location was also a factor for Broadie, who will depart shortly for St. Andrews University in Scotland. A native of Britain, Broadie is returning home after 17 years in the United States.
Randall, whose research on super-string theory revolutionized particle-physics theory, returned in September to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after two years at Princeton.
In what, Ostriker called standard procedure, vacancies left by Hochschild and Holmes have been filled by Wilson School professors Paul Krugman and Eric Thun.
He added, however, that not all vacated positions need to be filled.
"There are gradual shifts from one department to another," he said. "If all positions were refilled, the University would have remained exactly the same as it was 100 years ago."