Abstract
This essay considers a student-led protest that took place in 1882 at Syrian Protestant College as a moment of rhetorical negotiation in which (Arab) students unsuccessfully construct and deploy an "imagined America" to speak back to (American) faculty and administrators. This essay's historical analysis helps illustrate the high stakes and implicit promises of transnational knowledge economies today and in the past, as represented in and through the globalization of American-style institutions of higher education and the assumptions about citizenship, and literate practices, that are attached to it.