For starters, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Dartmouth's new president, proposes to revolutionize the delivery of health care around the globe and higher education in the United States. We don't know what he has planned after lunch, but we're pretty sure it will be ambitious.

And whatever it is, the ambition will be big and embody a high ideal: To put an elite American college in service to the whole of humankind. Not to rest there, Kim insists that this service be quantified and measured to prove its effectiveness. In other words, he's an idealist, but a pragmatic idealist -- one who wants to win, on the football field, in the classroom and in the settings to which he has devoted his life as a physician, providing health care to some of the most impoverished people on Earth.

These are first impressions, of course, but as the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and Dartmouth's 17th president, inaugurated last week, has made a good one. If we sound a little breathless, it is because the scope of Kim's vision for the college is, well, breath-taking.

First and foremost, the new president wants to build on the pioneering research in health care outcomes conducted by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice to make the effective and efficient delivery of health care an essential part of the Dartmouth Medical School curriculum. For this, he would draw on the expertise of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and Thayer School of Engineering, as well as the medical researchers. “We could become the center of the world” in thinking about health care delivery, “both in the United States and globally, since we have all those pieces in place,” he told the Valley News editorial board earlier this month.

As if that were not enough for any single college presidency, Kim went on to describe how a similar method might be applied to measure the effectiveness of higher education, to, in effect, be able to point to specific outcomes as the result of a university interacting with young minds.

How the college's various constituencies will receive all this is anybody's guess. Ours is that the students will be inspired, the alumni skeptical, the faculty hopeful but a little uneasy, and that employees will continue to worry about their job security in the context of the recession's lingering ill effect on the college’s finances.

If the latter attitude seems a bit parochial, it's a parochialism we share. How does the Upper Valley fit into this very big picture? In one very obvious way, as a laboratory in which to conduct Dr. Kim's great experiment in health care delivery. “There is no reason the Upper Valley can't be the absolute model for the United States and the rest of the world,” Kim told the editorial board. That certainly wouldn’t be a bad outcome.

The new president also suggested that student volunteering in the Upper Valley and elsewhere would also benefit from the effectiveness test: “We have to be sure when students are going out and they engage in social activities, that what they're doing is actually well thought out and effective and has an impact.”

More broadly, we hope that as Kim becomes fully acquainted with the Upper Valley, he will recognize just how powerful is Dartmouth's influence on the community, in everything from employment opportunities to health care, from business development to building construction to social and cultural interactions. One might even say that when Dartmouth sneezes, the Upper Valley catches a cold. Dr. Kim seems well positioned to foster a healthy relationship.