The agenda represented on this website is rather curious. ND Watch pretty clearly rejects fundamental Catholic moral teaching and with it any significant adherence to that teaching on the part of the University. ND Watch is also concerned about the athletic emphasis of Notre Dame, in particular the emphasis on football. This immediately gives rise to the question: If you don't like the Catholic Church and you don't like football, why do you want to be at Notre Dame? (Of course football is not just football. There is generally a strong emphasis on athletics of all sorts here, from Bookstore Basketball to the Bengal Bouts to pickup games on the quads.)If we remove these factors, then Notre Dame as we have known it disappears. It is not Notre Dame. Should there even be a Notre Dame? This is a serious question. I suspect the answer is that to have something like Notre Dame might be OK, but not here, not in this place where serious academics pursue our serious enlightened agendas. If you want a real university, a research institution that can be taken seriously, then you reduce athletics to club status and put aside confessional affiliation, except perhaps as window dressing. The supporters of ND Watch have a mission, a vision for what they are about. We who love Notre Dame for what it is and for what Fr Sorin intended it to be need to be clear about the vital importance of her mission. If the world is increasingly dangerous and the domestic economy is falling apart, then this is the time where a Catholic university can be of immense value. May we believe in our Catholic mission more fervently than ND Watch believes in theirs.