An assitant professor of English at Kolkata’s St. Xavier’s University was reportedly forced to quit her job on the charges of posting ‘inappropriate’ photos on her private Instagram account.
The complaint was filed by a father of a first-year male undergraduate student who was caught looking at the pictures of his female professor in a swimsuit.
In the letter written by the father to the University, he claimed that he had found his kid viewing images of the professor from the institution that were โobjectionable,โ โvulgar,โ and โbordered on nudity.โ
โRecently, I was appalled to find my son looking at some pictures of Prof. where she has posed in a sexually explicit way causing deliberate public exposure. To look at a teacher dressed in her undergarments uploading pictures on social media is utterly shameful for me as a parent, since I have tried to shield my son from this kind of gross indecency and objectification of the female body. It is obscene, vulgar and improper for a 18 year old student to see his professor dressed in scanty clothes exhibiting her body on a public platform,โ the complaint reads.
The former assistant professor Nandini Guha has claimed that the institution fired her as a result of a written complaint from the parent of a first-year male undergraduate student.
She said that she was handed the guardianโs letter of complaint and a piece of paper with thumbnails of various images from her personal Instagram account.
She asserted that she was not told how those images were taken as her profile was a private profile and no one else could get access to her pictures other than the ones who were in her list. She also said that the pictures were on her Instagram profile two months before joining the University.
Guha alleged that she was pressured to quit as she had โbesmirched the reputation of the universityโ. However, St. Xavierโs has denied her allegations and claims the assistant professor resigned voluntarily.
Guha made a police complaint against the university on October 24, 2021 that her private Instagram account may have been compromised, leading to the disclosure and distribution of her images. She added that the universityโs treatment of her dismissal constituted to sexual harassment and intentional character assassination.
In her police complaint, Guha said that โThe only way in which such Instagram Stories can be accessed by other parties is by hacking or if someone had taken screenshots of the pictures when they had been posted and subsequently circulated themโฆโ
On 25th October 2021, she chose to resign. When in March 2022 Guha sent a legal notice for SXU, Kolkata to provide โa copy of the complaint letter from the guardian, the minutes of the meeting of October 7 and other relevant documentsโ the university said that the notice had โfalse, frivolous, fabricated and ill-motivated allegationsโ and denied any of the allegations made against them.
The university not only asked for an unconditional apology from the teacher but also โcompensation of Rs 99 crore for โcausing immense and irreparable damageโ to the universityโs โgood name, fame and goodwill.โโ