During a period of several decades before and after the American Revolution, France played an influential if not formative role in numerous attempts to create a new American higher learning. After independence, the English college model, dominant for well over a century, no longer inspired or satisfied a small but influential group who demanded republican form and content in higher education as in government. It was to France, the protector of the revolution, that these leading Americans looked for a continuation of inspiration and example in their attempts to found institutions of higher education befitting, to use Seymour Lipset's term, the first new nation.