A faculty member of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was on Monday terminated from his services after an inquiry committee found him guilty in a case of alleged sexual harassment filed by a foreign scholar. The complainant was pursuing research under him.

The decision was taken at an emergency meeting of the Executive Council (EC), the varsity's statutory decision-making body.

According to sources, the professor had allegedly called the research scholar to his house for a party and misbehaved with her. She approached the university’s Gender Sensitization Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH), the watchdog for dealing with such issues, which suspended him. “In its enquiry, the committee found him guilty and recommended action against him. A meeting of the EC was convened to take a call on the issue. It decided to terminate his services with immediate effect,” an official source said. The professor could not be contacted.

The EC’s decision comes at a time when JNU is under criticism over the maximum number of sexual abuse cases reported from all the higher education institutions in the country.

Last week Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani had informed the Lok Sabha that 25 cases of sexual harassment were reported from JNU in 2013-2014. Last month, Swati Maliwal, chief of the Delhi Commission for Women, had also said that as much as 50 per cent of the 101 sexual harassment complaints filed in 16 educational institutions in the Capital since 2013 were from JNU.