WHEN HURRICANE RITA spun through southeast Texas in 2005, Lamar University’s 270-acre campus in Beaumont suffered heavy damage. Rita’s 100-mph winds ripped holes in the basketball arena roof, busted windows in old academic buildings and flung books from shelves leaving them rain-soaked on the floor. The wind toppled and splintered hulking trees along Lamar’s quaint pathways.

The school reached out to Randy Best, one of its richest and most successful graduates, for help with the $45 million repair bill. Best—the Dallas-based entrepreneur and political donor who profited mightily in the early days of No Child Left Behind—saw an opening, clear as the eye of a storm, into the higher education market. He had a vision to market a state school like Lamar to a new set of students—ones who would earn their degrees without ever watching the Lamar Cardinals play at Beaumont’s Montagne Center, and without schlepping across campus to find a book tucked away in some musty sanctum of academia.

Lamar’s enrollment was plummeting and its campus was trashed. A salesman of Best’s caliber could take one look and see the situation for what it really was: one great, rain-soaked, market-cracking, cash-spewing opportunity.