Donors give $600m to the University of Queensland

The University of Queensland has beaten its $500m donation target by $100m in its first major fund raising campaign.

University of Queensland vice-chancellor Deborah Terry said the generosity was “absolutely uplifting”. Photo: John Gass

The University of Queensland’s first major fundraising campaign has collected $600m in donations for research, teaching facilities and student scholarships, beating its target by $100m.

Since 2013 when it began, 16,600 donors have pledged more than 34,000 individual gifts to the university as part of the “Not if, When” campaign that aimed to raise $500m by the end of 2020.

But the target was reached a year early and the pace of fundraising actually increased during the year of COVID, with a total of $607m committed by the end of last year.

UQ vice-chancellor Deborah Terry said more than $10m was donated specifically to deal with the pandemic, most of it to support the university’s vaccine candidate, and more than $1m to help fund student hardship scholarships. Over half the donors were alumni of the university, Professor Terry said.

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The campaign, chaired by eminent UQ researcher and former Australian of the Year Ian Frazer and his wife Caroline Frazer, was launched publicly in 2017, although fundraising for it began in 2013.

Professor Frazer, the co-inventor of the HPV vaccine which protects against cervical cancer, said that he and his wife had given more than $1m to the campaign through their family foundation to support scholarships for disadvantaged students.

“We believe a tertiary education is one of the most useful things you can give somebody,” Professor Frazer said. “I’m giving back what was useful to me.”

He also said that philanthropic support had been essential to ensuring the development and adoption of research breakthroughs at UQ.

HPV vaccine co-inventor Ian Frazer and his wife Caroline, who jointly chaired the “Not if, When” campaign.

“Potentially revolutionising research can stall before it has a chance to reach those who need it most without support,” he said.

Andrew Liveris, a UQ alumni and former CEO and chairman of Dow Chemical, gave $13.5m to the campaign to set up the Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership at the university.

Another major gift came from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which has committed over $50m to degrees in western civilisation at the University of Queensland, supporting teaching staff and student scholarships.

The campaign has endowed 136 student scholarships at the university, including medical scholarships from a refugee couple from Vietnam, Alan van Tran and Minh Ha Tran, who set up a bursary to support indigenous students to study medicine.

Alan van Tran graduated in medicine from UQ in 1983 and said that he and his wife “are humbled to now be in a place where we can support those who need assistance”.

Other gifts have come from young people, including a Victorian boy who sent $6.70 to support the university’s work on a COVID vaccine, and Year 5 students at St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School Brisbane who held a movie night to raise money for coronavirus research.

Over 60 per cent of the money raised was directed toward research, including funding clinical trials in motor neurone disease, stroke, cancer and dementia, and supporting projects to deal with climate change.

Energy entrepreneur Trevor St Baker has given the university $3m for research into sustainable, environmentally friendly transport, giving $1.5m last year on top of an earlier gift of the same amount in 2018.

The campaign has also funded new professorial chairs in business ethics, sustainability, classics and science.

Professor Terry, who returned to UQ this year as vice-chancellor after leaving in 2014 to head Curtin University, said she had been involved in the early planning of the campaign.

“To come back … and see such participation and generosity was absolutely uplifting,” she said.