Heythrop governors meet to discuss future

THE FUTURE of Heythrop will be at the top of the agenda when governors of the cash-strapped London University college meet next week, writes Joanna Moorhead.

One of the proposals understood to be before the board is to give the Jesuit-run college a new status as a “School of Advanced Study” of the university, which would put it on a par with organisations such as the Warburg Institute, the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Latin American Studies.

Proposals to merge Heythrop with St Mary’s University, which were driven by a serious financial shortfall at the college, foundered earlier this summer.

Staff at the college say the feeling is that while the Jesuits have not covered themselves in glory over their handling of the matter, the time has come to move the agenda on to what can be salvaged of the college, which was described last week by leading theologian Professor Sarah Coakley as a jewel at the heart of Christian academia. She was among 34 academics who signed a letter to The Times calling for the college to be saved.

“So far this narrative has been finance-driven,” said one source. “But if you clear that out of the way, the place we have to start from is an honest appraisal of the college’s assets. And those assets are that it’s a first-class academic institution, and that it has an extraordinarily impressive library of more than 250,000 books which we’d like to keep intact as a resource of London University.”

One model the college would be looking at, said the source, was re-establishing Heythrop as a postgraduate centre of philosophical and theological research, with the possibility of distance-based online learning for undergraduate studies.

However, any chance to salvage the college in its current prime site in London’s Kensington, the source said, was now past: too much of the Jesuits’ financial commitment to the place was tied up in the capital value of its site.

Senior figures at the college accepted that the long-term implications of fewer Jesuit staff, who in the past have been paid only subsistence salaries, would further make the college untenable from a financial point of view.