One of Australia’s largest universities, the Queensland University of Technology, has committed to dumping fossil fuel investments after a two-year campaign by students and staff.

In a move that surprised and delighted campaigners, the university’s vice-chancellor, Peter Coaldrake, revealed on Friday the university’s $300m endowment fund would divest its shares in coal, oil and gas companies.

QUT becomes the second-largest of four Australian universities – alongside the Australian National University, La Trobe University and the University of Sydney to join a global divestment movement that withdraws support for industries fuelling climate change.

Coaldrake said he told staff in an email that a review of its investments “relative to climate risk” had led it to direct its external funds manager, the Queensland Investment Corporation, to ensure it had “no fossil fuel direct investments”.

It followed an open letter a year ago from more than 120 QUT academics urging the university – the ninth-largest in Australia with more than 45,000 students – to divest.

“We recognise our important responsibility to be an institution that is not only environmentally and socially responsible but also financially sustainable,” Coaldrake said.

“In practical terms this means that QUT is committed to an orderly and considered transition away from investment in fossil fuel companies while simultaneously ensuring that QUT continues to build the broader funding base essential to our future.”

But the Queensland Resources Council mocked the announcement in a statement from chief executive Michael Roche, which said “hundreds if not thousands” of QUT graduates ended up in the resources sector.

“Presumably no QUT buildings in the future will be made from steel to avoid having to use coking coal (an essential ingredient in making steel), nor will students or staff be able to catch public transport or ride bicycles, which are also made from resources commodities,” Roche said. “Bicycles made from hemp seem like a safe option for the new real world at QUT.

“I also assume the science labs at QUT have come up with a way of performing experiments without using Bunsen gas burners.”

Ruaela Rusch, a science student and spokeswoman for Fossil Free QUT, said the university had “shown real leadership on climate change and I’m so proud to be a student at an institution taking climate change risks seriously”.

She said QIC’s typical funds exposure to coal, oil and gas companies was 10%, which, if extended to QUT’s investments, would amount to $30m.

Adrian Barnett, an associate professor in the health faculty, said the university had “listened to the concerns of students and staff, many of whom recognise climate change as the key issue of the 21st century”.

“It was an odd situation that we had staff researching the Great Barrier Reef and the health effects of climate change, whilst at the same time the university’s investments were propping up the major threat to the reef and our health,” Barnett said.

Jubilant campaigners gathered at QUT’s inner Brisbane campus on Monday to celebrate the decision, chanting: “We won.”

Mark Thompson, a QUT engineering graduate and coordinator of Queensland campus divestment for environmental group 350.org, said it was “time for other Queensland universities to follow QUT’s lead”.

The decision reflected staff and students’ “deep concern about the morality of investing in an industry blocking action on climate change”, he said.

Rusch said the campaigners would seek to continue pressure on the university over its separate links to mining companies, including between its business faculty and the Indian miner Adani.

The University of Sydney, Australia’s third-largest university with 54,306 students, remains the nation’s biggest tertiary institution to dump fossil fuel investments.

Universities now account for 35 of the more than 520 institutions worldwide – commanding $3.4tn in investment funds – that have committed to dumping fossil fuel investments, according to 350.org.