Academics have voted to stage a walk out on Thursday next week in response to a long-running quarrel over pay offers.

Lecturers and academic support staff from the University and College Union (UCU) will be striking from 11am to 1pm on the 23rd to protest over a pay increase of 1 per cent, which the union has described as “miserly”. There are plans for an additional two hour walk-outs on 28 January between 2pm and 4pm, and on 10 February from 9am to 11am. UCU has claimed this will mean tens of thousands of lectures and seminars face disruption across the country, including in Cambridge, although it stressed that “any kind of disruption is always a last resort”.

Explaining the action, UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt said: “Despite another embarrassing round of embarrassing revelations about the very handsome pay rises those at the very top have enjoyed recently, universities are still refusing to improve a miserly 1 per cent pay offer and are still oblivious to the hypocrisy of their actions.”

This new industrial action follows two waves of joint strikes staged last term by the UCU, UNISON and Unite unions and supported by CUSU. Staff and students joined picket lines outside major University of Cambridge sites on 31 October and 3 December, before gathering for rallies outside the Senate House on both occasions. Speaking at last October’s rally, Mordecai Paechter, a first year student from King’s appearing on behalf of CUSU, called the one per cent pay rise offer “insulting”: “The students will support the staff all the way”, he said.

UCU say that the pay offer they are faced with means academics will have seen a 13 per cent real terms cut in their salary since 2009, leaving them with “little option but to escalate our action”. But the University and College Employers Association (UCEA), the higher education industry body charged with negotiating pay, have rejected the strikes as “a cynical move to cause, in the union’s own terms ‘maximum disruption’ while minimising cost to members”.

“Employers have expressed disappointment at UCU’s latest tactic to disrupt higher education institutions, this time targeting students”, a UCEA spokesman said. “Institutions will do their very best to protect students but this industrial action is designed to damage the student experience. However, the overwhelming majority of staff realise that the UCU’s demands for higher pay increases are neither affordable nor sustainable.

“The pay increases implemented last month and backdated to August 2013 actually totalled around 3 per cent in most institutions; with the 1 per cent for all on top of 3 per cent incremental increases for many, plus merit awards.” However, unions have argued that cash surpluses held by universities, estimated to amount to £900 million this year, mean that higher education institutions can afford to increase pay further.

NUS president Toni Peace has backed the call for a greater increase in pay, describing the current increase as a “measly pay offer to staff made by vice chancellors who are receiving pay raises of 8 per cent”. But she also urged UCEA and unions to find a solution: “We need to see the employers and unions getting round the table”.