Date published: 2005/09/26
The University of Cambridge says:
The University of Cambridge has launched a major global fundraising campaign, aiming to raise £1 billion by 2012. The Cambridge 800th Anniversary Campaign will seek to secure the excellence of Cambridge in the 21st century.
Launching the Campaign in London yesterday (22 September), Professor Alison Richard, Vice-Chancellor of the University, said: "Cambridge is one of the world's greatest universities. Our commitment to sustain this pre-eminent position and our outstanding contribution to education, scholarship and research is reflected in our ambitious Campaign target of £1 billion."
"Our 800th anniversary in 2009 is a cause for great celebration. But it is also a time for reflection on the challenges we face and the opportunities that we must grasp if we are to remain a beacon of excellence internationally."
The Campaign has four investment priorities:
- Our students;
- Our staff;
- Discovery and creativity;
- Our collections and architectural heritage.
The University and Colleges are working closely together on the Campaign and gifts to any of the institutions that make up Cambridge will be counted against the target.
Richard was at Yale for many years and was in some sense hired to exactly bring this kind of American-style fundraising campaign to fruition. As it happens, Trinity College had a couple of reunion events this past weekend for its alumni. And the Master (Martin Rees) was amazingly blunt in his two speeches about the university fundraising exercise. In the first reunion event, an "annual gathering" (dinner) for those people who matriculated in 1980 or 1981, he even said that if this was America the two classes would be fighting each other to see which could raise more money. (The guests did not take up the challenge.) He also said that these annual gatherings would increase in frequency from once every ten years to once every five years (per class). The second reunion event was, for the first time ever, a luncheon where all past alumni were invited (well, up to the limit of 700 which were catered for), and the pleading continued. Indeed, after the Master spoke, another senior member of college spoke in the most cringing way (the longer he spoke, the worse he made it for himself). Now Trinity is the biggest and richest of the Cambridge colleges, and many people see little purpose giving money to it, but, as Rees said, there is no point having a rich Trinity if the university goes down the plug hole, and the pleading really was on behalf of the university rather than Trinity. (Although, as it says in the press release, college fundraising will be counted against the university total, and no doubt Trinity would be willing to accept a cheque.)
The university, like all universities in the world, does face financial pressures. But it seems that relative to most of Europe, Cambridge and Oxford (and a few others) are doing fairly well. The real competition is with the US universities (although that country seems to be heading inexorably downhill) and in a decade or two the real competition will be with the emerging universities in Asia (so far, Singapore and China).
The main pressure on the university is undergraduate finance. A large part of that is still provided by the UK government, and the constant petty and destructive interference by the latter has not helped the university. One option is for Cambridge to go private, but that seems unlikely in the short term.
Another pressure on the university is the large number of research staff on short-term contracts. These people provide the bulk of the research in the university but are treated with a cavalier "here today gone tomorrow" attitude (but not quite so bad as the equivalent staff in America). Indeed the university itself recognised this problem a few years ago (only because it affects women more than men). But instead of offering more permanent jobs, the university instead created a whole new layer of bureaucracy offering dozens and dozens of courses for staff (everything from how to write a CV to a networking, "springboard", course for women). Unfortunately the bureaucracy is often part of the problem, not part of the solution. The real point of the university, after all, is teaching and research.
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