With Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway due to leave Yale for Northwestern University in June, the University is forging ahead with the task of forming its Dean Search Advisory Committee.

Joy McGrath, Chief of Staff to University President Peter Salovey, told the News that the President’s Office is in the process of recruiting people for the advisory committee, which will consist of 10 to 18 undergraduate students, administrators and faculty members. However, she said that the Office would not announce further details until it has heard back from those asked to participate in the search.

The Yale College Council solicited applications from interested undergraduates in a Jan 10. email to the undergraduate community. According to YCC president Peter Huang ’18, the YCC was asked to narrow down the number of undergraduates who applied to serve on the search committee to three before submitting the names to Salovey last Thursday. The exact number of students who will be selected to serve on the committee is not yet known.

Huang told the News that the undergraduate component of the search committee is important because the University hopes to conduct the search in a “holistic” manner.

“In the grand scheme of things, a person on the committee, as an undergrad, may not have a very forceful [role] or a position,” Huang said. “But because the Dean is going to be overseeing Yale College, I would say compared to other committees that are more University-wide … the undergrad will have a [greater] role to play.”

Holloway announced his decision to leave Yale in an email to members of the University community last November. He will assume the position of provost at Northwestern University in July.

Holloway told the News that he is not at all involved in the search process, adding that he would expect not to be. Additionally, he stated that he is unsure about how the current search process will unfold, particularly in light of the fact that the searches for the last two deans of Yale College took place under “very different circumstances.”

When Holloway was named in 2014, the University was searching for three deans at once; in addition to a new dean for Yale College, there were searches ongoing for a new Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as well as the inaugural Dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. According to Holloway, the dean search before that, which yielded Mary Miller GRD ’81 , took place in the middle of the fall semester and was a “very quick” search.