Racial categorization has been a contentious subject for Arabs in the United States navigating the racial politics of everyday life. Scholars like Sarah Gualtieri and Evelyn Al Sultany have studied how Arab American racializations have been negotiated through a multitude of legal channels and popular culture. My paper looks at another site of racial production, the university, and the particular position of migrant scholars in the institutionalization of knowledge about Arabs, and the Arab world, and race. I ask: how have global projects of race, and connections between universities, produced a particular type of U.S. Orientalism, and how does that relate to racial formations of Arabs in the United States? To answer these questions, my paper focuses on the critical period interwar period, when the United States government began an effort to garner expertise on the region known as the “Near East.” After Woodrow Wilson announced his “14 points,” a racialized vision of colonized peoples’ fitness for self-government, questions surrounding both the potential for modernization and the racial origins of people from the Near East became linked and interdependent. My paper traces how American scholars circulating between elite American universities and the American University of Beirut produced racial knowledge which revealed the “true race” of the Lebanese, and positioned them as the most advanced peoples in the Near East. I then track the careers of the Lebanese students who studied under these scholars, and used the science produced at their alma mater to write histories of Arab peoples both for burgeoning Near East Studies programs in the United States and popular consumption. Their works used scientific discourse on Syrian and Lebanese racial supremacy in their explanations of history, creating a hierarchy between Levantine Arabs and those from the Arabian Peninsula. I pay particular attention to the scholar Philip Hitti, and his seminal History of the Arabs,. Using archives from the American University of Beirut, Princeton, University of Chicago, and published anthropological articles, my paper uncovers how American imperialism in the Middle East produced an elite Syrio-Lebanese population which justified its position through racial science. By focusing on this circulation of knowledge, my paper sheds light on the global production of race, the role of the university as a producer of race, and the ramifications of legacies of imperialism on the articulation of Arabness in the United States.