Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—4th Cir.: Professor, called ‘lesbian reject’ and denied promotion, gets second shot at bias and retaliation claims, (Aug 28, 2025)

By Kathleen Kapusta, J.D.

“When someone says, ‘watch this, hold my beer,’ what follows rarely turns out well.”

While the Fourth Circuit agreed with the court below that a Morgan State University professor’s Title VII sex discrimination claims relating to her unsuccessful 2019 and 2020 promotions were procedurally barred, it reversed summary judgment against her Title IX, Section 1983, and state-law claims based on those non-promotions as those statutory provisions were not governed by Title VII’s procedural requirements at issue here. The appeals court also reversed summary judgment on the professor’s discrimination, retaliation, and wage inequality claims relating to her 2016 promotion application, finding, among other things, that the district court erred in failing to consider comments made by the department chair in 2014 about the professor’s sexuality as well as evidence of the university’s differing justifications for the non-promotion decision. Judge Quattlebaum, concurring, joined “those urging the Supreme Court to clarify or overturn McDonnell Douglas” (Hollis v. Morgan State University, No. 24-1476 (4th Cir. issued Aug. 27, 2025 and amended Aug. 28, 2025)).

“Reject lesbian.” At the time of her hire in 2014 as a tenure-track assistant professor, the plaintiff’s $60,000 starting salary was at the lowest end of the starting salary range for such positions in her department. Shortly after she joined, a male graduate student claimed the department chair told him the professor would never receive tenure because she is a “reject lesbian” and that only “her boys,” the male professors, would “get the crown jewel.” A month later, the chair allegedly told the same student the professor was a “disgusting lesbian.”

First promotion application. In September 2016, at the beginning of her third academic year, the professor sought promotion to associate professor with tenure. The department chair, however, deferred the decision for more than a year, claiming the professor’s research was unsatisfactory because it was sometimes published in “pay to publish” venues. The dean adopted the recommendation. The university president also adopted the deferral recommendation, offering the professor one year to supplement her application or be terminated.

The professor appealed, arguing she was entitled to more time to resubmit her application. Her appeal languished until she filed an EEOC charge alleging unlawful discrimination and retaliation. The faculty appeals committee then recommended affirming the deferral but agreed that she was entitled to more time to supplement her application.

Demoted. In December 2017, the university president rejected her appeal and denied her promotion and tenure. The university also decided that her initial three-year contract, which began in 2014, had not been extended and had expired in June 2017, and as such she was currently serving as an at-will employee, and her promotion application had been untimely.

Denied. The professor applied for a retroactive renewal of her original contract, which was granted. She then reapplied for promotion to associate professor, which was approved shortly after the EEOC found reasonable cause to believe she had been subjected to discrimination. In 2019, she applied for promotion to full professor. When that was denied, she reapplied in 2020 with the same result. She was ultimately hired by Pennsylvania State University as a full professor with tenure, and she left MSU.

Lower court proceedings. The professor subsequently sued MSU for sex and pay discrimination and retaliation and the district court granted summary judgment against all claims.

2019 and 2020 promotion applications. Addressing first on appeal the professor’s Title VII claims regarding her 2019 and 2020 applications for promotion, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the district court that the claim arising from the denial of her 2019 application was time-barred. Although she administratively exhausted the claim, she failed to timely amend her original complaint, which was already pending in court. Nor did she separately exhaust her claim related to her 2020 application. Thus, her claims related to those promotion applications were procedurally barred.

Although the district court, relying on Title VII’s procedural requirements, also granted summary judgment against the professor’s Title IX, Section 1983, and state-law claims regarding her 2019 and 2020 promotion applications, those statutory provisions, the appeals court observed, are not governed by Title VII’s procedural requirements at issue here. Accordingly, the court reversed summary judgment on those claims.

Sex discrimination. Turning to her sex discrimination claim based on her 2016 application, the appellate court found the district court erred when, after concluding that the department chair’s “reject lesbian” and “my boys” comments were not direct evidence of discrimination, disregarded them entirely. Even if those comments, made in 2014 by someone who was not the final 2016 decisionmaker, were not enough by themselves to establish intentional sex discrimination, they were relevant circumstantial evidence that could support an inference of discrimination.

The appeals court also found a fact issue regarding the rationale on which the district court relied to reject the professor’s sex discrimination claim—that MSU denied her 2016 promotion application because she lacked a strong publication history. While that was the reason given by the department chair, the chair conceded the professor had a high level of productivity. She faulted the professor, however, with publishing three articles in pay-to-publish journals and two in journals in which she was on the editorial board. Even accepting this criticism, this left the professor with two articles, and at least one of her male colleagues was promoted to associate professor with tenure after publishing just two “unaffiliated, non-pay-to-publish” journal articles.

Further, while that was the reason the professor was first given in May 2017, the university later claimed she had not been reappointed to a second three-year term as an assistant professor and thus her promotion application was untimely. However, the professor had never received the written notice required if her first three-year term had not been renewed and the university had scheduled her to teach a fourth year of classes without any indication her status had changed. From all this, said the court, a reasonable jury could infer that MSU’s proffered “untimeliness” rationale for non-promotion was pretextual.

There was also evidence the university failed to follow its own internal policies in dealing with the professor’s 2016 application. Not only was there a significant delay in responding to her application request, the department chair did not assemble a review committee to consider renewing the professor for a second three-year contract and the dean adopted the chair’s deferral recommendation before a school committee’s review. Taking all this evidence together, the court reversed summary judgment on the professor’s sex discrimination claims arising out of the denial of her 2016 promotion application.

Retaliation claims. Regarding the professor’s retaliation claims arising from the same promotion application, the court noted that she engaged in protected activity by circulating her EEO complaint internally and then filing it in September 2017 and MSU demoted her to at-will status in December 2017. Based on the three-month period of time between the two, a jury could infer a causal connection.

Though the university again argued that the purported discovery in December 2017 that she had never been renewed for a second three-year term was the reason for her demotion, the court again pointed out that there was evidence from which a reasonable jury could conclude that MSU did not actually believe her contract had lapsed and was instead using that excuse as a pretext to mask the real reason for its decisions. Accordingly, the court reversed summary judgment on her retaliation claims as well.

Wage claims. Finally, as to the professor’s wage discrimination claims under Title VII, the Equal Pay Act, and state law, the court found the district court erred in finding there was no evidence that would allow a jury to reject MSU’s proffered reason for the disparity in starting salaries between the professor and her male comparators—it paid the male colleagues higher starting salaries primarily because they had more community-college experience and stronger publication histories at the time of hiring.

Here, the court found a fact dispute regarding whether MSU actually gave significance to community-college experience in setting salaries. Not only did it find the professor “well qualified” to be hired based on the community college experience she had as well as her “wide experience at other Higher Education institutions,” none of MSU’s written materials indicated community-college experience would be more monetarily valued than other higher education administration experience. Further, said the court, a jury might find that to the extent MSU was setting salaries based on community-college experience, it assessed the professor’s qualifications differently than those of her male colleagues and discounted the research she had conducted on community colleges and the leadership position she had held at a community college.

Continuing disparity. Moreover, said the court, the professor’s wage discrimination claim extended beyond the time of her initial hiring and there was evidence a pay disparity persisted throughout her time at MSU. For its part, the university argued that as long as the initial disparity in starting salaries was based on qualifications and not sex, then continuing salary differentials based on the unequal starting salaries do not violate the Equal Pay Act. But that theory, explained the court, “would not apply to cases like this one, where an employee’s subsequent salary is not based solely on her starting salary, but can instead be increased, or not, at the discretion of her employer—here, through merit raises or promotion—for lawful or discriminatory reasons.”

And here, the professor applied for three promotions and one merit raise and each time MSU determined that she did not meet the promotion or raise criteria so her salary remained the same. Rejecting MSU’s assertion that evidence of her post-hiring qualifications was irrelevant to her wage discrimination claim, the court found “such evidence must be considered in evaluating whether MSU impermissibly allowed an initial pay gap to persist and grow by denying [the professor’s] promotion applications and her request for a merit raise.” As a result, the court also reversed summary judgment on this claim.

Concurrence. In a separate concurring opinion, Judge Quattlebaum argued that “McDonnell Douglas should be scrapped, or at least revisited.” Asserting that it “has no textual basis,” he joined “many other judges and Justices in calling for the clarification, or overturning, of McDonnell Douglas’ burden-shifting framework. Congress gave us enough guidance with the text of Title VII. We do not need to muck it up with our own test.”

The case is No. 24-1476.

Judge: Harris, P.

Attorneys: Nathaniel Allen Deacon (Georgetown University Law Center) for Leah P. Hollis. Anthony G. Brown, Office of the Attorney General of Maryland, for Morgan State University and Gloria Gibson.

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