The academy endured an initial fifteen years of mismanagement before President James Monroe, a leader with military experience in the Revolutionary War, named Colonel Sylvanus Thayer to be its new superintendent in 1817. Thayer had graduated first in his class at Dartmouth in 1807 and earned his commission in the Corps of Engineers in 1808 after studying one year at West Point. Following the Napoleonic Wars, Thayer was sent by Secretary of War James Monroe to France to study the curriculum of the École Polytechnique. The French school would become the model for reshaping the academy under
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