Kim Clark said during a speech Wednesday that his colleagues at Harvard were in "stunned disbelief" when he notified them he had accepted the post of president of Brigham Young University-Idaho.

"Then that moved rapidly to a feeling that I'd lost my mind," Clark said. "Nobody could understand it."

But BYU-Idaho is "one of the best, if not the best, places in the country to do innovative things in education," Clark said. He outlined three priorities:

• Raise the quality of the students' experience by finding new and better ways to educate them, to prepare them for an increasingly challenging world.

• Reach more students. Clark called it "pathetic" that in today's world so few young people receive a university or college education. "In the years ahead, that's not going to work," he said. "We can't have the country we want, the society we want, unless we have a much more educated population."

• Lower the cost of higher education. "Higher education has a higher rate of inflation than any other product" in the United States, Clark said. "Higher than pharmaceuticals. And that's totally unsustainable."