Thousands of students at Dublin Institute of Technology face the prospect of not receiving their exam results following a vote by lecturers to take industrial action over the failure to reappoint six of their colleagues.
Under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, 130 DIT lecturers' jobs were due to be converted from part-time to full-time posts.
All the lecturers concerned had to apply and be interviewed for the full-time posts, and all were offered full-time posts except for six.
Last week, the lecturers in the college, members of the Teachers Union of Ireland, voted by a majority of nearly 90 per cent to mark this year's exam papers but to withhold the results from the DIT authorities.
The exams started two weeks ago and will run until the first week of June. The union's action becomes effective next Friday.
The TUI general secretary, Mr Jim Dorney, said last night that in every other institute of technology in the country part-time lecturers had gone through the same procedure as DIT and all had been re-appointed to full-time jobs.
The president of DIT, Dr Brendan Goldsmith, said the lecturers' action was in "complete breach" of the PCW agreement, which had laid down that there would be four stages in the changeover from part-time to full-time posts. He said that although the six lecturers at the centre of the dispute had not been appointed after the first stage, there were still three stages to go.