I called up Jim Freedman the other morning – I’m not quite sure why. Maybe just to say hi, maybe to talk politics a little, maybe to hear his big bellow of a laugh. “I have about a day left,” he said.

A day left? A day left for a man who had transformed two universities? A day left for a man who knew more funny stories about serious people than anyone who ever lived? A day left for a man who was the Thomas Jefferson of his day, perhaps the only person on Earth who had read just about everything worth reading in his time? He couldn’t mean that he had only a day left.

But Jim was one of those men with a wicked sense of humor who nonetheless never, ever kidded around. He had a bit more than a day left, it turned out, but not much. He died Tuesday at age 70. I miss him already.

James Oliver Freedman was a big, quiet man, given to introspection, happiest in a big chair with a big book and a big chunk of time to read it. Freedman loved to read the way many of us love to eat. He didn’t read to live. He lived to read.

And now that he is dead, I can only wonder: What happened to everything he knew? Did all of that knowledge that he poured into his head simply disappear with him? Are all of those stories from the classics and quotes from books we could only dream about having conquered merely gone, clouds dispersed by the winds of a New England spring?

Freedman was the president of Dartmouth College, and before that he was the president of the University of Iowa. At both places he led by moral example, by making people believe they could and should be better and raising the standards – mostly by believing higher standards were better and by living himself at a very high standard. (He had a guilty pleasure we shared: Trollope novels. May God forgive him, and me, too.)

I know all this because I was a Dartmouth trustee, and when Freedman retired in 1998, all 14 of us got together with him for a celebratory dinner in a New York hotel and, with a sense of awe and of utter mystery, we examined the Freedman style in our uncharacteristically Socratic way: Did he personally raise a lot of money? Well, no. Was he a legendary lecturer? No. Was he a beloved figure on campus in the Mr. Chips sort of way? No. Did he spend his weekends building hiking trails or barreling down ski mountains in the old Dartmouth way? No. That’s four “no” answers. But the answer to the fifth question was an unambiguous “yes.” That question: Was he a great college president?

He was a great college president because it was his conviction that it wasn’t worth having a college that itself wasn’t great. I remember hearing him argue once that we should shut down one particular department – a particularly popular department – because it wasn’t good enough and because every effort we made to make it good enough had failed.

He thought in terms of “pinnacles of excellence”: We can’t do everything, he would say, so we should do only what we can do very, very well. That is a good lesson, not only on a college green.

Freedman once wrote that American college students were rich in idealism and al truism but poor in role models. “They are not so much indifferent to idealism as uninspired by their elders,” he said, “not so much misled in their values as left to flounder on their own.” He wanted to make sure the cure was on campus.

He thought the purpose of life (besides, of course, reading) was to make a difference. He had a theory of life that might be described as the Theory of Marginal Difference. He was a Harvard man, which was no advantage to him on the Hanover campus, and he once told me that in his heart of hearts what he really had set out to become was the president of Harvard, not the chief of the more rambunctious, more freewheeling institution – half college, half cult – to the north. But he was content at Dartmouth, because he felt it was a place where he could make a substantial marginal difference.

And he did. He didn’t tame the place, and he didn’t suck the spirit out of it, but what he did was quite remarkable, and it is a metaphor for what education ought to be about – not so much about changing an institution or a person, but about making an institution or a person a far, far better version of itself.

Jim Freedman had the vision (and the courage) to imagine that a college that had been satisfied with being good enough could determine, with a little nudging, that it was not good enough. He taught all of us a lesson about how to lead.

But what he really was teaching all of us – thousands of us, who mourn today the passing of this gentle man of the book – was how to live. Good enough is simply not good enough.