In 1981, Qatar University’s first president wrote “[a] modern university obviously exists in the present, but it has roots in the past, and aspirations for the future” (Kazem, 1981, p. 5). In this presentation I seek to unpack what the past means to present day higher education spaces amid rapid internationalization processes that govern academic (im)mobilities. In the first part of this presentation, I use the writing of Dr. Mohammed I. Kazem, an Egyptian scholar and the first president of Qatar University, as a point of departure to understand how QU’s academic space was configured spatially in the 1970s and early 1980s. Resorting to archival research I map the international networks the university was embedded in by reviewing the affiliation of speakers, academics, and the associations the university participated in during its founding phase. The Third-Worldist ethos encapsulated by Amado M’bow’s UNESCO, the leading international partner in establishing the university, would interact with the already existing Islamist and Arab Nationalist connections in Qatar’s government and ministry of education, as well as the wider currents in the developing Arab states, to fundamentally reflect the “international” character of QU at its inception. Perhaps no one embodied the amalgamation of these currents more than Kazem, who had already played a significant role in setting up institutions elsewhere in the Arab region, most notably founding the College of Education of Al-Azhar University, In the second part, I discuss the ‘noisy silences’ in the archival material and supplement this by interview data with the first wave of Qatari academics that worked at the institution. Through this process of both archival excavation and oral history, I shed light on what was erased and purposefully forgotten from the institution’s founding history, and from the imaginaries of subsequent generations of Qataris. Overall, I argue that by understanding QU’s past, the ethos driving it, and the nature of solidarity networks it was enmeshed in, we can envision an internationalization of higher education unlike that governing academia today — one built on notions of solidarity rather than competition. Furthermore, by welcoming the ghosts of the past — the academics erased from the institutional archives and the topics flagged as contentious — we can begin to challenge constraints imposed on our academic spaces and envision a more epistemically inclusive one.