£60m ‘will help city university pioneer research’

Sir Alan Langlands has taken over at the university as it announced it had received its largest ever donation – of £9m from Lord Laidlaw – and revealed ambitious plans to bring in more funds from its graduates.

Although the Leeds University Making a World of Difference campaign was only launched publicly last week the work has actually been going on at the university for several years.

The £9m, which will help the university to complete its new city centre library by 2015, means that the university is already two-thirds of the way to reaching its target.

Sir Alan told the Yorkshire Post that fundraising was increasingly important to universities as the level of public funding into higher education declined.

But he also said that increasing the money a university could generate through alumni and philanthropists increased the freedom it enjoyed.

“The university’s budget is £560m but the majority of that is being provided for a specific thing. It comes in and it goes out.”

The Leeds University campaign launched last week has five themes or key areas: students; arts and culture; human health; climate change; and global society and business.

The campaign’s strapline is “Making a world of difference.”

When it was launched, the university’s chancellor, Lord Bragg,said: “Our aim is as simple as it is ambitious: to use our outstanding teaching, research and facilities to make a major impact on global society.

“Our £60m campaign is playing a critical role in helping us to achieve that vision.”

Sir Alan said: “Support from donations has got much more important. There is much less in the way of public funding than there was before.

“I don’t want to be overly critical of Government. They are investing in science and technology because they think that there is an economic good which results from that.”

The support the university receives from its alumni stretches beyond the UK.

Organisations such as the North American Friends of the University of Leeds pull together graduates from as recently as this year to those who attended the university in the 1950s.

Sir Alan said. “We are in 
contact now with 200,000 graduates across 160 countries and 10,000 of them are giving financial support in some way to the university. We are looking to raise £60m and we are already two-thirds of the way there.

“With projects like this there is a quiet phase where work is being done but now we are at the point where we want to really start talking about it.

“I think this might have happened sooner had it not been for the university under going a change of leadership.”

Sir Alan succeeded Professor Michael Arthur at the start of the university term.

Sir Alan said three of the main goals of the fundraising campaign were to create new opportunities for less privileged student, to further the university’s research and to develop the campus.