Strawberry Hill: is it all about university status?

Just a suspicion, and I do not have any inside knowledge, but it is when I get to the last sentence of  the penultimate paragraph of the statement by the Chair of Governors of St Mary's - original on the College's website here, and reproduced by Fr Tim here - that my antennae start responding (added italics are mine):

The Governors have total confidence in the Senior Management Team who have worked diligently and in accordance with our constitution, due process and our Catholic ethos in what has been a difficult time as we continue to strive to gain our university title.

Whether "the establishment of a Centre for the Study of Catholic Theology and ...... the merger of the Schools of Communication, Culture and Creative Arts and Theology, Philosophy and History into a new School of Arts and Humanities" represents a secularisation (by which I mean a reduction in the Catholic or explicitly theological character) of the study of theology at undergraduate level is difficult to gauge. The parallels to similar arrangements at other institutions suggest that the Centre for the Study of Catholic Theology might well be a post-graduate arrangement, with a spirit of studying Catholic theology as a phenomenon rather than undertaking a systematically Catholic study of theology as such. I think one can be forgiven for being a bit suspicious that the two developments put together will not in any event strengthen the Catholic nature of theological study at St Mary's  ....

...... but it might all be rather attractive to secular authorities about to make a decision about university status.