Harvard will officially kick off its long-awaited, roughly $2 billion fund drive with a gala celebration at The Stadium on Friday, May 13, Provost Jerry R. Green said yesterday.

The launch of the capital campaign--expected to be the largest fund drive in the history of higher education--will be "a real academic event," Green said, featuring multiple speakers, symposia, campus tours and possibly a "campaign video."

More than 1,000 guests, both alumni and non-alumni, will be invited to the event, Green said. He said the University is exploring ways to involve other alumni "by electronic means," possibly including closed-circuit television hook-ups at Harvard clubs around the country.

"We're not going to try to keep it exclusive," the provost said, adding that he hoped the ceremonies would be "interactive," and include speeches by administrators, alumni, faculty and students.

Green said the May launch date has no special historical significance, and was chosen over the summer for "calendar convenience."

"Only Harvard would start a campaign on Friday the 13th," Green said.

He said the kickoff festivities-- which are being coordinated by a team ofplanners--will likely spill over into Saturday,May 14.

Green said the University will use the timebetween now and May to publicize the case for thecapital campaign. He said he will author afive-part series on the campaign's needs,scheduled to run between mid-November and lateDecember in the Harvard Gazette. And PresidentNeil L. Rudenstine has said he is in the finalstages of drafting a 60 or 70-page case report,and will release that document within the next fewweeks.

Green declined to pinpoint the exact dollartarget for the campaign yesterday, though hehinted it would likely be made public before May.

He confirmed press reports that the campaignwould be a five-year process, and said the $2billion goal that has been reported was "a prettygood guess," though he said the actual target maystray from that figure by as much as 20 percent.Green stressed that the goal would be determinedsolely by "priorities and needs."

The provost said the University is currently"ahead of schedule" in terms of the size of thenucleus fund of donations collected prior to thecampaign.

Green would not specify how much money theUniversity has raised thus far. But fundraisingexperts say nucleus funds typically amount toabout 30 percent of a campaign's target. Thatwould mean that the University should have roughly$600 million in hand by the time the fund drive isformally announced in May