On Tuesday, the governors of the eminent Jesuit higher education institution meet to decide whether they can agree on a plan to save their college. If they fail, a series of missed opportunities and misunderstandings could signal the end of 400 years of the order’s teaching

One of the headlines on the Heythrop College website says, “New Thinking on Catholic Education”. It’s an advert for a conference coming up in September and it says a great deal about the role of the college in Catholic life in this country; despite all its recent travails, including the ending of undergraduate teaching and two failed attempts at mergers with other colleges, it is still a centre for Catholic thought. But there is an irony about it too: where the new thinking is running out is on the future of Heythrop itself.

Earlier this month it emerged that attempts to secure a deal with Roehampton University – which would have confirmed Heythrop, the specialist theology and philosophy college, as a teaching and research institution – had collapsed at the eleventh hour. Then came another hammer blow: its principal, Michael Holman, had stepped down due to ill health.

Just what is happening to Heythrop and why the deal with Roehampton fell through is not entirely clear. Investigations and talks with academics, who are desperately worried about the situation, have given some indication of what has happened.

Not that the Heythrop crisis is new. It had once been possible to run a small, specialist teaching college, with one-to-one Oxbridge tutorials for all students, with no discernible financial crisis. But, in the twenty-first century, higher education is competitive as never before. Increasing regulation of the sector means more paperwork, and the ending of caps on student numbers means that other institutions can admit far more undergraduates than was previously possible.