From the start, Notre Dame was in a more difficult position than some of the other non-profits that sued the government over Obamacare. Unlike, say, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who largely employ elderly nuns, Notre Dame is a huge, diverse institution that provides insurance benefits to people from a range of religious and ideological backgrounds. While the school is Catholic, it doesn’t require faculty or students to be Catholic or sign a statement of faith—“what it means to be a Catholic institution is a little more contested,” said Bryan McGraw, an associate professor of politics at the evangelical Wheaton College. “This kind of ambivalence was reflected in its litigation.”

Notre Dame was less successful than some of the other religious non-profits that took on cases. The school argued that even signing a waiver of exemption from the birth-control mandate was a form of facilitating immoral conduct, causing a theological “scandal”—defined in the Catholic tradition, in their words, as encouraging others to engage in wrongdoing. The school lost at the Seventh Circuit and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but the case was eventually remanded and effectively dropped. In the end, the school decided to comply with the mandate rather than face significant financial penalties.

But the situation changed when President Trump got elected. In early October, after the Trump administration announced new moral and religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act, Notre Dame’s president, Father John Jenkins, “[welcomed] this reversal.” Under President Obama, “the government decreed which institutions were sufficiently religious to be exempted and forced those who were not to sign the HHS waiver,” he said in a statement. Last week, a new policy was announced: All birth-control coverage in university-sponsored plans would end on December 31.

Over the past month, birth-control coverage “has been a huge focal point of discussion” on campus, said Katherine Bermingham, a member of the school’s independent Graduate Workers Collective. (I attended college with Bermingham.) The group staged a demonstration, and the student paper, The Observer, covered the issue closely. “Most of the audible voices are people who really think contraception is a matter of conscience,” Bermingham said, and who believe “the university should not be using economic and political power to coerce the decisions of its employees.” Other students supported the university: Alison O’Neil, a sophomore, recently wrote in a letter to the editor at The Observer that her peers should “stop criticizing a Catholic university for upholding its belief system.”

But then, on Tuesday, Notre Dame suddenly changed course. Although the university “follows Catholic teaching about the use of contraceptives,” which are prohibited, the administration “[recognized] … the plurality of religious and other convictions among its employees,” the university’s human resources office said in an email. Meritain Health and OptumRx, two of its medical-benefits providers, “advised that they will now continue to provide contraceptives,” and the school “will not interfere with the provision of contraceptives that will be administered and funded independently of the university.”* In other words: Now that the government isn’t demanding university officials sign any form having to do with contraception, the administration is prepared to look the other way at what its health-insurance providers covered.