Education secretary David Blunkett has launched a bitter attack on Sheffield Hallam University vice-chancellor Diana Green for her criticisms of the government's higher education funding record.
He has accused her of making disingenuous, "breathtaking" and politically motivated accusations in a critique that she circulated to all her staff. He described her interpretation of government announcements as "dismaying".
Professor Green accused the government of using "smoke and mirrors" with its announcements on funding, and blamed a continuing decline of public investment for the industrial action that is paralysing many new universities. She said that the 3 per cent was all the sector could afford to give lecturers this year given continued underfunding.
The "headline" figure of £1 billion additional funding for universities announced late last year to be in place by 2003-04 "was sadly a product of the usual smoke and mirrors", she claimed, and only about 50 per cent of the package was "new" money. Also it would not benefit all universities and had too many strings attached.
"If we ignore the contribution of students, then the actual public contribution (to funding per student) goes down," she said.
Mr Blunkett wrote to a constituent, a Sheffield Hallam lecturer, that he was "dismayed" by the circular. "Of course, the contribution towards fees will be counted as income to the university. It would be bizarre and deeply perverse not to. The idea that (vice-chancellors) should discount such income as though it did not exist is frankly breathtaking. I do not know about politicians 'spinning', but I do know when someone is trying to make a perfectly reasonable income stream sound as if it is surreptitious or even dishonest."
Professor Green was unrepentant in the face of Mr Blunkett's attack. She said: "The government's announcement did not make it completely clear that the only way that a decade's decline in public support for teaching and learning could be halted was by including the student contribution."
- Lecturers' union Natfhe is furious at Professor Green's decision to stop the pay of any member of staff who takes part in industrial action, including those who work to contract.
The union is balloting for strike action in protest at the threat and is organising a vote of "no confidence" in Professor Green.
Professor Green said that universities had a legal and moral obligation to their students, and that the industrial action was damaging them.
"I hope for an early end to this damaging dispute so that we can move on and continue to tackle the underlying problem - the gross underfunding of the higher education sector. Employers and unions are, after all, united in a common cause: to get more funding into higher education," Professor Green said.