A grave loss for Catholic laity

For John Henry Newman, the ideal university was a community of thinkers engaged in study for the sake of it. In his 1852 series of lectures on The Idea of a University, England’s most notable Catholic intellectual rejected the idea of a restricted vocational education. Speaking when only the elite benefited from university education, Newman could not have conceived of a time when around two million young people would be studying at British universities, with places heavily oversubscribed. Nor could he have imagined today’s market-driven education system where the consumer is king. Britain’s universities are in many ways a success story, with three of them in the global top 10 of institutions and the country ranked as number one in the world for research. But the system that has bred success has also led to universities and colleges battling against one another to attract students. In such a world, small is not beautiful; it is vulnerable.

This appears to have been the undoing of Heythrop College, the Jesuit-run institution teaching theology and philosophy, which has been part of the University of London and which has now announced that it can no longer continue in its present form. 

Its loss is a tragedy for education, for the Church and the Jesuit order. Thousands of Heythrop graduates have benefited from studying in a small college where one-to-one tuition, rare outside Oxbridge, has been the norm. Yet Newman warned against colleges being too narrow, saying that students’ experience was enhanced by being around those studying other subjects.

It appears that school leavers today prefer colleges with more choice of subjects and more facilities, while the administration costs of a small college in a highly regulated market are prohibitive.

Without the Jesuits and their substantial subsidies, Heythrop would not have survived for as long as it has. Catholics in Britain should be grateful to the order for the profound contribution the college has made to education in this country. But Heythrop’s problems also suggest a failure by the Jesuits to understand until too late what they were facing. While Maynooth in Ireland, founded for the formation of priests, adapted by reinventing itself as a mainstream university, Heythrop did not. Nor did the Jesuits manage to complete a proposed merger with St Mary’s University, another success story. The former Catholic teacher-training college transformed itself into a broad-based university with a Catholic ethos that is growing student numbers at the rate of 10 per cent a year.

Both sides have indicated that the reasons for the breakdown in year-long talks about a merger are financial. Given the substantial sums of money that the order’s accounts reveal it has to hand, let alone the value of the London prime real estate in which Heythrop is based, it is regrettable that the Society of Jesus could not provide an endowment that would have enabled Heythrop to survive as part of a new, bigger university of St Mary’s-Heythrop.

Undergraduate and doctoral students are no longer being recruited by Heythrop. The college has indicated that it will try to preserve its Bellarmine Institute, which provides tuition for seminarians and Jesuit scholastics, and the British Jesuit provincial, Fr Dermot Preston, has spoken of future collaboration with the Church in England and Wales. But however vital is the schooling of priests, a Vatican II Church needs  more. The wider service of Heythrop in helping to educate the Catholic laity is in danger of being lost.