Harvard launches drive to raise US$6.5b in donations
The fundraising drive by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution is the university's biggest and believed to be the most ambitious ever undertaken by a university, ahead of one concluded last year by Stanford University in California that raised US$6.2 billion.
Harvard, the richest university in the United States, said it would seek to raise US$6.5 billion in donations to fund new academic initiatives and bolster its financial aid programme.
Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said the campaign would help the school meet the world's increasingly complex and pressing needs.
"We will meet these challenges, and in doing so, we will reaffirm what makes Harvard - and universities in general - such essential and irreplaceable contributors to the pursuit of knowledge and the welfare of the world," Faust said in a press release.
Harvard unveiled its campaign at an event featuring Bill Gates, who spent three years at the school in the 1970s before dropping out to co-found Microsoft.
Gates, who was ranked by Forbes magazine this year as the world's second-richest person behind Mexico's Carlos Slim, joked about his decision to leave the university during a talk before alumni and donors.
"You never say that you are 'dropping out' of Harvard. I 'went on leave' from Harvard," he said. "If things hadn't worked out for my company, Microsoft, I could have come back."