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The Alumni Fund
The University of Buckingham's
Alumni Annual Fund was launched in Bermuda and the Bahamas in 2004.
It was an exciting new development for Buckingham and it was our
first venture into asking our alumni for their help on a regular
basis. The fund is of enormous importance to the University and
will enable it to continue its programme of expansion and its
constant efforts to improve the student's experience. You will be
only too aware, from your time at Buckingham, of the importance of
an alumni fund. It will help finance new buildings; renovate the
existing traditional buildings in an appropriate manner; provide
even more scholarships, and attract more professors to engage in
first class teaching and research.
The Vice-Chancellor, Dr Terence Kealey, stressed the need for the University to engage in fundraising in his speech at Graduation in 2005.
The need for money
“Finally, I want to return to the theme of money. Universities, if they are to have the staff:student ratios that they should have, and if they are to recruit the leading scholars they should do, cannot do it on fee income alone. No independent American university tries to do that; instead they raise money to provide the appropriate support for scholars, scholarships and facilities. Indeed, there is a sense in the best universities by which the students do not pay to attend but the universities - by their endowments and gifts - subsidise the students to attend. You've heard how we are building new schools of education and medicine and how we've been successful in raising money for them, but we also want to grow our existing schools of Law, Business, Science, Social Science and the Humanities, and we will increasingly look to you, our alumni, to help support the schools from which you are graduating today.
Benefit for alumni
Why should you, having just paid fees, give us more money? You do have an incentive because the better this University, the more prestigious your degrees become, and therefore the more valuable they are to you. If you invest in us you are also investing in yourselves. The British are bad at asking for money. The Americans are brilliant at it, which is why Harvard has endowment of $20 billion dollars, and Princeton, Yale and Stanford have endowments of $10 billion dollars each. There are now over 30 independent American universities with endowments of over $1 billion dollars each, and this is why so many of them are so good.
Be proud of your alma mater
We want Buckingham to be as good. We want all the graduates and alumni of Buckingham to be fiercely proud of a wonderful university. So over the next few years we will be increasingly suggesting that if everybody gives small sums of money regularly - and if they are regular, small is good - we can build this place into a global centre of excellence. Judging by the increasing media interest in us, Buckingham is already re-emerging as an innovative and exciting university, and we hope you'll be able to power that over the years to come”.
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