He sees the ability to take "the best of what we do in the off-line world and put it online." He describes a class session involving small groups of students who would engage each other and involve active decision making during an exercise that would simulate the situation faced by NASA engineers in the minutes prior to the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. The role-playing situation would include "phone calls, e-mails, meetings going on with the flow of that situation," all simulated online.

By examining how and why they act and react under pressure the way they do, Clark said, students develop a "much different knowledge base" than they could by simply listening to lectures and taking notes. "You not only learn from what happened but from the deeper understanding underneath the way it happened, why it played out the way it did. . . . It's almost a 3-D learning experience.

"Imagine applying that same concept to all sorts of things in many different ways of immersing students."

The methods technology offers make the faculty-lecture-student-take-notes method more archaic than it already is, he said, adding that even without advanced technology, good teaching must involve active student engagement.

That's one reason Clark said he believes in the university's model for athletics — "we have no intercollegiate athletics, for which I'm very grateful." That has eliminated programs that took all the money and focused on a few select athletes. Instead, the school has a "much more powerful and useful program of activities that involves thousands of students, not just a few."

The intramural sports, outdoor recreation, social activities and service projects that are a part of the school's activities program add diversity and breadth to a student's education in ways that can't be duplicated by intercollegiate competition, he said.

Rolled together, the continuing innovations have started a wave change that has already begun to reconfigure the futures and fortunes of students and residents, many of whom remember the flood that wreaked havoc here nearly 30 years ago when the Teton Dam failed upstream.

But instead of destruction, they see new waves coming through town now, not with uprooted trees and homes but bringing jobs, growth and unprecedented renown to a place Clark's former Harvard colleagues had never heard of when they learned earlier this year that he was leaving the nation's most prestigious business school for Rexburg.

Described by some Eastern publications as a "rural backwater" better known for the quality of its spuds than its students, few along the Beltway in Boston understood Clark's motive for moving to Idaho, though he was famed for his faith in the LDS Church. But when he said the decision was spirit-driven, the skeptics scattered.

It's hard to argue with something you can't see.