Qatar has invested billions of dollars in growing its higher education sector over the last two decades. The centerpiece of this investment is the Education City complex, home to branch campuses of six elite American universities. These institutions are part of Qatari leadership’s strategic planning around knowledge economy development, meant to provide citizens with skills to become entrepreneurs, bolster the private sector, and replace foreign professionals, who now control the workforce. Branch campuses, which focus on liberal English-language secular co-education, have however become a source of tension among some Qatari citizens, who see them as emblematic of a turn toward too much Westernization and an erosion of traditional national values, particularly around gender roles and Islam. They also feel that many citizens are excluded from Education City while foreign resident students benefit from its offerings. This paper, through the experiences of different actors as they navigated branch campuses in Education City and their relationships to identity formation, citizenship, nation-building, and imaginings of the future, discusses the role of liberal higher education in the making of transnational Qatar. At the same time, examining the inherent contradictions of American academia from the vantage point of Qatar highlights how ideas about the liberal and the illiberal are constantly emergent, contain within them their own undoing, and reveals investments from both sides of the globe in maintaining mythologies of liberalism and its others.