The Lebanese state has been characterized as weak, shattered, or even absent. Research on state institutions is rare in studies on Lebanese politics, even when political disputes revolve around the role of the state. As with much scholarship on the Middle East, scholarship on Lebanon mainly traces the emergence, and politicization of different ethnosectarian groups. Even when scholars do take the state seriously, they often assume it is only an instrument of pre-existing ethnosectarian groups. However, the state is not only a stronghold of privilege and resource extraction, but also an arena of political contestation and group formation. In the formative decades of state building in 1950’s and 1960’s Lebanon, there were competing understandings of belonging. How did different national ideological currents tie into the state formation processes of that period, and why did they fail? To answer this question, I take the case of the only higher public education institution in Lebanon, the Lebanese University (LU), as an arena of state-institution building. Using archival materials at the Lebanese National Archives, I look at the state's education policies and parliamentary debates, as well as the key ideological and political struggles of the formative years of the LU. I conclude with an analysis and contextualization of print publications of an untouched source: the magazine publications of a centrist nationalist student movement that grew out of the School of Pedagogy in 1969, known as Harakat Al Wa’I (The Consciousness Movement); along with extended interviews with key intellectuals of the movement. Historians see the expansion of public education in the 1960s, and especially the creation of the LU, as one of the most favorable state reforms of that era. Before that, privileges in the state’s bureaucracy and the education system were domains of sectarian inequality and sectarian apportionment. The expansion of educational provision across sects, and the inflation of the state’s bureaucracy prompted student unions and teachers’ associations to question the validity of the sectarian system, and allowed the question of education to be central to political conflicts. By the late 1960’s, the LU had become an intellectual hub for political contestation both between and across sectarian groups. Analytically, universities are more than sites of education. They shift class structures, and reflect the local, regional, and global ideological movements of their time. Universities are strategic research sites for processes of identity formation and understandings of belonging in developing countries.