The closure of Heythrop College, with a history it can trace back 400 years, is a serious loss not just to the Catholic community but to all who value the pursuit of learning at the highest level. It was a unique component of the University of London and a resource serving many valued purposes, not least by making respected degrees in theology and philosophy accessible to clergy and laity, male and female.
As John Henry Newman recognised in The Idea of a University, an academic community is more than just a collection in one place of talented individuals. It is a set of personal and intellectual relationships able to feed off and stimulate each other across the boundaries between disciplines, in the knowledge that generations before have done the same in earlier versions of the same institutional culture.