When I arrived at Wycliffe at the end of my sentence, I thought I had come to the only establishment in Britain that had worse food and plumbing than HMP Belmarsh. But Wycliffe had its virtues. They included a diverse and talented student body, a prayerful spiritual life at the heart of the collegiate regime, and a special commitment to training students for lay and ordained ministry.

Has all this been lost amid the current disputes? Absolutely not, I can say with the conviction of a grateful ex-student who stays close to the college as a regular visitor and intermittent lecturer. The clash between Wycliffe's principal and some members of staff is real; but before examining those issues it is useful to take an overview from four other important perspectives - of the student body, the governing body, the university, and the church inspectorate.

Wycliffe's 150 students appear to be solidly supportive of their principal, Richard Turnbull. Presidents of the student common room have backed his leadership with written accolades. Women students - 30% of the enrolment - to whom I talked were outraged by the reports of homophobia, misogyny, bullying and theological extremism, which they say are nonexistent in the college's culture. Wycliffe's governing body, the hall council, is equally steadfast in rejecting these allegations and expressing full confidence in the principal. Oxford University is not involved in the staff disputes. The rumour that because of them Wycliffe was about to lose its status as a permanent private hall of the university is unfounded. The rumour started because, coincidentally, a panel is in the final stages of a review of all permanent private halls. Those who have seen the first drafts of the review say it is favourable to Wycliffe.

To understand the disputes' origins it is necessary to appreciate the impact of a confidential Church of England report on Wycliffe following a visit by inspectors in 2004. They recommended an overhaul of the management in order to make "ministerial formation central rather than peripheral to both the ethos and the managerial structure of the college"; a business plan; an improvement in chapel services; and the direct accountability of certain tutors, particularly the director of ministry, to the principal. The hall council decided a new broom was needed to make the changes, so they appointed Richard Turnbull, a former Hampshire vicar, church historian and chairman of the business committee of the General Synod.

Turnbull swept vigorously. On ly time will tell whether his new staff appointments, which look good on paper, will succeed in practice. But those who opposed his right to change staff were surely fighting on the wrong battlefield. This is where personal grievances, sometimes bitterly expressed, entered the equation. At the heart of the controversy lies a personality clash between Turnbull and a part-time Wycliffe research fellow, Elaine Storkey, who is now the subject of disciplinary proceedings. She has surprised even the most neutral observers with the vehemence of her attacks not only on Turnbull, who she publicly compared at a meeting attended by staff and students to "one of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg ", but also on the chairman of the Hall Council, Bishop James Jones.

Such tensions are sad in a Christian community, but my prediction is that the temperature will return to normal when Wycliffe starts the new academic year with a full complement of staff and students. As for the present troubles, the more I hear about them, the more they seem to reduce the dispute to the level of personal resentments.

For what is at stake here are not substantive issues of conservative versus liberal Anglicanism, nor questions of academic freedom, nor even the right of a college principal to be ultimately responsible for staff appointments and managerial decisions. At the end of the day this is a shake-out of half a dozen academics who did not like doing what the principal, the governing body and the church inspectorate wanted the college to do. The row may be noisy but Wycliffe's primary mission, to train future ministers of the church, will not be affected.

---Jonathan Aitken is a former cabinet minister; his books include Porridge and Passion: An Autobiography, and Prayers For People Under Pressure