This dissertation investigates the relationship between student performance in the college writing classroom and student participation in other writing publics within the university. Writing teachers can better understand how and why college writers resist the composition classroom by analyzing extracurricular forums in which they produce a public discourse about their educational experience. Drawing on cultural studies, public sphere theory, Bakhtinian formalism, and critical gender and race studies, this dissertation advances the scholarship of resistance in composition studies beyond its usual focus on classroom politics. In an initial textual analysis of resistance in critical pedagogy and curricular theory, this work shows how the pedagogical framing of most discussions about resistance in composition has limited our collective understanding of the term. Moving on to a rhetorical analysis of Dartmouth College's student newspaper in the early 1970s, I use the specifics of this case study to argue that the "student public" has the potential to become a repository for socially conservative, resistant strategies that take shape at the fault line between the University and the culture at large. Advancing this argument about the student public into the digital age, I use discourse analysis and literacy theory to argue that college rating sites have become a "wild public sphere," in which students critique and resist their college experience. Finally, in a return to the classroom, I use a combination of case study analysis and cultural theory to argue that plagiarism is a type of student resistance that typifies the importantly public dimensions of the term. Arguing throughout for the value of a public lens in understanding resistance in the writing classroom, I call on teachers to devise new strategies of response to their students' resistant rhetorics.