Dear alumni
I'm delighted to be speaking to you as I
come to the end of my first academic year in post. It's been an extraordinary
year. I've enjoyed meeting many of you in Cambridge and London and at events
around the world from New York San Francisco and Mumbai to Beijing and Hong Kong.
I have been moved and inspired by your passion and commitment and your
support for this university. You are central to our continued success and in
enabling Cambridge to have as great an impact on the future as on the past and
the present. This has been a year of successes and challenges. Cambridge has
continued to appear at the top of the league tables. We have seen triumphs in
sport against our great rival on the river and on the rugby pitch. I'm pleased
to say that this year we have admitted our most diverse cohort of students yet.
I acknowledge that we still have much work to do in this area but I am
committed to ensuring that a Cambridge education is open to all talented
students irrespective a background or origin. Here too we will need your
support. We've also been grappling with crucial issues for the future of the
University. One of them is staff pensions another is how we invest the
University's endowment to ensure we are both financially sustainable and
environmentally progressive.
This year we've seen the campaign for the
university and colleges go from strength to strength and become the most
successful fundraising campaign in our history. More than 50,000 of you have
given to this campaign so far. The impact of your philanthropy is undeniable.
It has allowed us to support bursaries for students who would not otherwise
have been able to benefit from a Cambridge education. It has funded a new
Institute for Public Policy and it has included the largest gift ever made to
UK science.
In these and countless other ways your
generosity is helping to change the world.
Over 3500 new graduates pass
through the doors of the Senate House at the end of June. They join a global
community of more than 250,000 alumni around the world.
Each of these graduates
will take out into the world the friendships, the ideas, the skills and the
memories that they have gained here at Cambridge.
They like you will remain part
of the university and college community for life.
We are incredibly grateful for
our alumni support as volunteers, as donors, as advocates and as our
ambassadors to the wider world.
And we need our alumni to help us in these
various capacities more than ever.
So please stay in touch - with your
college, with the University or with our network of more than 400 alumni groups
across the globe.
I hope to meet more of you over the coming months at events
such as the alumni festival and at global Cambridge events around the world.
Thank you, all of you for everything that you do for Cambridge.
Yours Stephen.
you