I don't know well about the sentence structure here. What is the subject? And why "is" is used when "universities" is plural?
Native speaker’s answer
Rebecca
This sentence is inverted, meaning the verb and object come before the subject in this sentence. "Universities" is the subject of this sentence and it comes in the form of "one of the world's most well-known and respected Universities". The verb "is" is used here after the plural of "universities", because even though the word "universities" is plural here, it is referring only to one university through the phrase "one of", which is Cambridge University. Since it is only referring to one university, it is correct to use "is" before "one of" in this sentence.