Fundraising was previously used to build Wolfson CollegeMihnea Maftei, Flickr

The University of Cambridge has announced that it will launch a new fundraising campaign this autumn that aims to raise an ambitious £2 billion.

If the target is met, it will surpass the £1.2 billion raised by its 800th anniversary fundraising campaign that ran between 2009 and 2011.

The appeal for donations is set to launch with events in October, which will start in the UK and then spread to the USA and across the globe later in the autumn and into 2016.

Cambridge’s latest fundraising campaign comes as the University endeavours to compete financially with its American competitors.

Vice-Chancellor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz justified the drive for donations by saying that “the reality is that the financial gap is widening”.

Borysiewicz lauded what the University has achieved on a smaller budget than American institutions, but said that these achievements will not “be enough” for Cambridge to either "consistently attract transformational philanthropy” or “remain a world-leading university.”

Last week, The Times Higher Education supplement highlighted that Cambridge is both surpassed financially and in terms of Nobel Prize winners by US universities.

The announcement has been anticipated since the university added 50 staff to its fundraising office and hired Alison Traub, former Associate Vice-President for Development at the University of Virginia, as executive director of development and alumni relations last year.

Traub, who was previously campaign director for a successful $3 billion fundraising campaign at the University of Virginia, has indicated that the new campaign will seek to engage “donors, alumni and academics” as well as building “fundraising capability systematically throughout our institution”. 

Cambridge’s collegiate structure, which leads colleges to run independent fundraising campaigns, has been cited as an impediment to the University’s ability to attract donations.

Some also point to alumni supposedly having a stronger allegiance to their college than the university as a whole as a factor.

However, Traub has indicated that Cambridge’s colleges will be at the heart of this new campaign, saying that “the success of the University is inextricably linked to that of the colleges, and vice versa”. 

It will bring the “University and colleges together” to achieve “maximum benefit to all”. 

In recent decades, philanthropic foundations have helped fund, among other things, the William Gates building, the Institute of Criminology, the Sainsbury Laboratory and Wolfson College. Substantial contributions are also regularly made by wealthier colleges.

@harryjcurtis