This article debates on the changing geographies of higher education and research crossborder cooperation by providing a critical analysis of academic cross-border cooperation in the European Union. We examine the role of higher education and research institutions within the multi-scalar and multi-actor context of cross-border cooperation in the European Union with a specific insight on the Pyrenean border. In this regard, the Catalan cross-border space on the eastern Pyrenean border constitutes an interesting case study. Considering both its dissymmetry and rhetoric of a culturally unified space, it reveals tensions and complexities in the making of an academic cross-border collaboration built on a rhetoric discourse of territorial proximity recently shaken up by national and regional injunctions.