Since then, nearly every major Catholic college has followed his lead and formed a lay board.

Father Hesburgh further inflamed his conservative critics by leading a group of Catholic educators to assert a degree of doctrinal independence from Rome. Meeting at the Holy Cross retreat in Land O’Lakes, Wis., in 1967, the group issued a landmark policy statement declaring that the pursuit of truth, not religious indoctrination, was the ultimate goal of Catholic higher learning in the United States. That position had implications for what could be taught at the universities and who could be hired to teach, issues that remain contentious.

Father Hesburgh received 150 honorary degrees from other colleges and universities. He was the only Catholic priest ever elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, and served as the governing board’s president from 1994 to 1996.

Father Hesburgh understood the special role football played in Notre Dame’s reputation. But he was not a huge football fan, and he resented the influence that collegiate sports had on higher education. At his inauguration as president in 1952, he was appalled when local newspapers sent sportswriters to cover the event, and he refused to cooperate with photographers who asked him to pose with a football.

“I’m not the football coach,” he barked at the surprised journalists. “I’m the president.”

Yet he was not averse to calling attention to Notre Dame’s football legends. When President Ronald Reagan gave the commencement address at the university in 1981 and received an honorary degree, Father Hesburgh referred in his remarks to Mr. Reagan’s role as the Fighting Irish halfback George Gipp in the film “Knute Rockne — All American.” The dying words of Mr. Reagan’s character, “Win one for the Gipper,” had by then become Reagan iconography.

“We welcome the president of the United States back to health,” Father Hesburgh told cheering students on the day of the visit, Mr. Reagan’s first major appearance outside Washington after the assassination attempt against him. “We welcome the president of the United States back into the body of his people, the Americans, and lastly, here at Notre Dame, here in a very special way, we welcome the Gipper at long last back to get his degree.”

Mr. Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932.

Theodore Martin Hesburgh was born in Syracuse on May 25, 1917, one of five children of Theodore Bernard Hesburgh and the former Anne Murphy. His father was an executive at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.