AHC: University Constituencies in the US

In the UK, universities used to be constituencies unto themselves. Your challenge is to import this to the post-Independence United States. Bonus points if it lasts to the present day.
 
The House of Commons has much smaller constituencies than the US House of Representatives. Furthermore, US House seats are allocated to states, which then define constituencies. In England (and I presume Scotland before Union as well) borough constituencies were created by royal charters. None of this could apply in the US.

However... It might be remotely possible for a state to award a seat in its legislature to a college or university in that state.
 
However... It might be remotely possible for a state to award a seat in its legislature to a college or university in that state.

Not after Reynolds v. Sims it wouldn't.

Of course, you could always have cases like that never come before the Supreme Court or be ruled against, which isn't hard either--just ensure that any Supreme Court cases regarding "one man, one vote" result in decisions that how states apportion their legislatures are to be left up to the states. OTL this would mean Colegrove v. Green is never overturned by Baker v. Carr.
 
A slightly more conservative Convention might have created University seats in the US Senate for Yale and Harvard (were there any others high status Universities in the 1780s?)
 
Several state legislatures have constituencies that are dominated by a university. Of course, in present times, they have to have the right population for a constituency. 50 years ago, the population didn't matter as much, so I'd imagine there were more back then, but population has always been a key factor in the size of American districts, and assigning states congressional seats based on the size of their populations was one of the great innovations of the early days of the US. Did any colleges ever have enough people for a Congressional district to make sense for them?
 
It just does not work in an egalitarian republic founded on the idea of one man, one vote.

Now then I am often trying to promote a particular hobbyhorse of turning Congress into an MMP type legislature where half the seats are district seats and half at large, to allow very fine tuned proportional representation. One type of small party I think might evolve in that circumstance might be a number of academic parties--which members of various professions such as scientists or humanities professors, grad students, and those of us who like to attach ourselves to the fringes of academia (not really me anymore, but I think I would at least vote this way) strongly favor in lieu of rattling around unappreciated in mainstream parties. With PR, a sufficiently large profession, especially one as divided from mainstream private enterprise as academics, could viably sustain a party of some tens or dozens in Congress, and then negotiate collectively with the mainstream parties to either coalition with or give piecemeal support eclectically to one mainstream bloc or the other on individual items of action.

So it depends on exactly what the intent of the challenge is. If it is just to give various universities their own reserved representative, it is hard to see how a strictly limited campus community is going to consistently match the size of a district over a couple centuries.

Now, Congress may indeed intervene both in the electoral machinery of their own elections and also in districting. Say Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Northwest Ordinance and other foundational aspects of the mechanisms whereby the territories the Union acquired would be converted to states, got Congress to write legislation mandating that each state maintain a state university system, and make one district they were apportioned always centered on the chief campus of that system--this would in some ways be the opposite of the districts Cambridge and Oxford have/had, for the old pre-revolutionary handful of universities we had would be excluded in favor of new state institutions, though I suppose some states might comply by elevating a pre-existing campus to become the flagship of the state system. But I'm pretty sure Jeffersonian legislation would be against that--Jefferson would hardly want William and Mary to take the place of his beloved and personally founded Charlottesville for instance, and would regard Massachusetts making Harvard the premier Massachusetts public school with much suspicion. Ivy League is by definition not public! I suppose that either someone might preempt Jefferson--Adams for instance. Or a Whig ascendency might find it practical to appropriate existing private universities by a quasi-eminent domain. But the Jeffersonian way would be the best harmonization of the basic democratic principle with privileging universities.

But it would hardly be Jacksonian!

If the intent is to get some people into Congress who are other than run of the mill lawyer-credentialed machine politicians, specifically more academic types, I think the approach of imposing proportional representation and then having some historic peculiarity that causes American academics to vote for their own as a bloc to get a handful of their kind into office as spokespersons for their perspective in government is a more workable way to go.
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And for something completely different, what if the Patriots lose the ARW? America is permanently a British colony? Under those circumstances I think Britain would initially be very harsh overall, but also favor development of a colonial aristocracy (including coopting a number of Native American tribes as allies of the crown against the semi-contained colonial European and African masses, along with handpicked Loyalist families). I have a lot of detail in mind. Anyway part of it would involve, over time, the general British system becoming gradually more democratic despite a strong deviation toward oligarchic authoritarianism in the early 19th century, and gradually permitting more effective local government (highly Balkanized, with all centralization of anything such as the Navy and military being firmly under London control via the Westminister Commons, House of Lords and Crown in Britain) that becomes largely democratic, but with those sorts of quaint details as desired here with special constituencies and so forth--it all evolves ad hoc and there are only sporadic and partial efforts at reform.

I have in particular envisioned a scheme whereby on paper it still appears that the Empire is ruled from Britain, by Britons in Britain and ostensibly for all but cynically for Britain, but in fact the real power does shift where it must eventually, to North America due to it becoming the center of mass of Anglophone population. (The number of Native Americans is an order of magnitude or more greater, or anyway nearly so, due to the Crown having adopted a policy of keeping Colonials in line by setting Native tribes in charge of vast territories as subjects of the Crown.) Still substantially speaking, eventually the North American territories do come to vastly outweigh the British isles in terms of English speaking subjects and either democracy must be denied, or the center of real power becomes American. But via subterfuge, in appearance the Westminster Parliament remains supreme and is staffed overwhelmingly or even entirely by British Members elected by British electorates. But there is a twist!

Anyway in this case the American campus constituencies would be for Parliaments or Assemblies or Conferences or whatever they are called in dozens or even hundreds of fragmented bailiwicks carefully prevented from having any sort of Continental Congress--divide and rule. America and other regions will have some centralizing elements of governance but they are top down Royal instruments beholden only to monarch and (Westminster) Parliament. No autonomous Dominions here! Though the fragmented mini-protectorates would by the 2000s have a great deal of autonomy. Empire is still supreme though.

And technically democracy and republicanism are dirty bad words, like socialism, anarchism and communism are OTL.
 
Isn't this a later addition?
As an achieved legal mandate, yes. As the obvious aspirational goal of the very logic of the Patriot movement of the 1770s...no! The "danger" they were opening the door to the mob was plain enough to every Patriot, especially the conservative ones. The philosophical implications of the arguments they were mustering against Tory tyranny were very plain, especially in New England, and Abigail Adams did not take long to extend the principle to her own sex as well, writing her husband John in the early years of the war that they should not forget the ladies. Quite a few New Englanders were plainly aware they were shooting slavery in the foot too and of course abolition in the northern states followed before the century was out.

Even though initially everyone was working with the assumption some kind of line could be drawn to distinguish fully enfranchised citizens from the rabble, or anyway darkly assuming others would be seeking to hold such a line, American republican institutions immediately began assuming the crystalline form of austere simplicity based on universal democracy, with no room in the classic lines for baroque and organic swirls such as institutionalizing special constituencies. Where these existed already for historic reasons, as in the miserable misapportionment of representation between Virginia's Tidewater old settlements and the growing but disfranchised western mountain settlements, the most noted revolutionary thinkers denounced them forthrightly. It might take centuries to really establish "one adult, one vote" as the norm in fact, and to this day there are people who deplore it, but the plain fact that basic revolutionary logic pointed right at it was a huge elephant in the room from the beginning. It helps explain why so many remained Loyalist!
 
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