How did Obama at ND happen? Look to the "Land of Lakes"

Diogenes lets us know that the Obama invitation didn't come about overnight:

Notre Dame’s Fr. Hesburgh was the rebels’ alpha male who ceremoniously announced that Catholic colleges and universities should be independent of, and no longer submissive to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church in their teaching and research functions, if they wanted to be “effective.” Evidently, the Notre Dame trustees, and the bulk of its faculty wanted the school to be “effective”—that is, well thought of in the editorial pages of the New York Times. They accepted the terms of rebellion. The ties to the Church were kept in name only.

This was all clearly and piously set forth in the second sentence in the Land O’Lakes declaration:

To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.

The statement has become mere fine print over time after it was buried in the marketing flourishes of the university public relations machinery. It is, nevertheless, the academic version of Non serviam. At the very least, it leaves aside Catholic teaching on artificial contraception, embryonic research and abortion—the flash points for the current outrage. But beyond the hot button moral teachings of the Church, this declaration positions the entire corpus of Catholic doctrine as negotiable elements within the "academic community itself."