'Callous' Hodge is berated by union

Furious lecturers' leaders said they could no longer support government plans for widening participation and called higher education minister Margaret Hodge "a disgrace" at their annual council last week.

A speech by Ms Hodge to the Association of University Teachers, in Eastbourne, infuriated delegates. They unanimously passed a series of emergency motions rejecting the government's strategy for increasing student participation and attacking Ms Hodge for brushing aside their concerns about low pay and casualisation.

The association warned that Ms Hodge had underestimated their appetite for a fight over pay and conditions, and had failed to grasp the seriousness of the problems threatening government plans to increase to 50 the percentage of under-30s in higher education by 2010. Delegates called the minister "grossly offensive", "disgustingly callous" and "pig ignorant".

Ms Hodge repeated her enthusiasm for funding mechanisms that would increase diversity, potentially creating "teaching-only" universities and a research elite. She did little to allay fears that national pay bargaining is heading for collapse and that performance-related pay is high on ministers' agenda.

An emergency motion from the Liverpool AUT, carried unanimously, said "it is no longer possible for the AUT to support the government's strategy for achieving the laudable aim of widening participation. This council instructs the executive to make it explicit to the government that the AUT will not cooperate with any measures that fragment the sector." It said the AUT would "not engage in further discussions on the widening-participation agenda unless the issues of funding and pay are addressed".

In the week that employers published a report on the worsening recruitment and retention crisis, Ms Hodge reportedly suggested that there was little evidence that low pay was a cause for concern and that casualisation was of little concern to ministers.

The Keele AUT tabled an emergency motion, passed unanimously and backed by the executive, saying: "Council calls on the executive to make clear to the government council's anger at Ms Hodge's patronising dismissal of casualisation as 'a matter between you and your employers'."

Keele University's Wendy Richards won applause when she said: "Minister, you are a disgrace." And Dundee University's Richard A'Brook said the ministers' claims that there was no evidence of a pay problem were startling. "The problem is not so much from the employers' side - it is a minister who is condemned out of her own mouth for being pig ignorant of the basic facts," he said.

The delegates unanimously carried a motion in support of the joint unions' pay claim, submitted to employers this week, which demands a 15 per cent rise.