ABSTRACT
This chapter places concrete sociopolitical arenas in the foreground and discusses universities as portals of globalization. It demonstrates how universities have acquired a symbolic function as portals of globalization in an increasingly interconnected higher education discourse. The university is charged with significantly more importance than in earlier times, and it becomes, through a discursive rescaling, more and more a portal of globalization. The chapter argued that a perspective on universities as portals of globalization can be useful to uncover complex respatialization and rescaling processes such as transregionalization. Universities have ascended in the hierarchy of institutions that are expected to master the challenges of globalization. The five arguments of the chapter provide grounds for seeing the university as a vital part in shaping processes of globalization. Depending on the university, there could be limitations, and going as far as calling every university a portal of globalization is probably too absolute.
