Nirmaljit K. Rathee, a sixty-year-old Asian woman who joined Delaware State University in 2009 and rose to Professor and Director of Education Graduate Programs by 2019, sued the university after it removed her from the director role in December 2023 and ultimately terminated her employment on October 29, 2024. The university's stated reasons for the December 2023 removal centered on her knowingly allowing a graduate student to sit for a dissertation proposal defense even though large portions of the proposal were plagiarized, her failure to report the plagiarism to the Department Chair, and her failure to appreciate the significance of the breach of academic integrity when confronted by the Department Chair. University officials also discovered during her leave that she had not been maintaining graduate school files on a shared drive accessible to department leadership. Her termination followed her subsequent refusal to teach undergraduate physical education courses she was assigned after losing the directorship and her failure to respond to multiple communications from university leadership.
United States Circuit Judge Todd M. Hughes, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, granted Delaware State's Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint with prejudice on April 16, 2026, holding that Rathee failed to plead facts sufficient to support any of her three claims: Title VII race and national origin discrimination, ADEA age discrimination, and FMLA retaliation.
On the Title VII claim, the court held that Rathee failed to plead two of the four required prima facie elements. First, she did not adequately allege she was qualified for the director position. Her own exhibits confirmed she knew of the plagiarism months before it was reported by another faculty member, she did not dispute that she violated university procedures by failing to report it, and she offered no facts showing she properly maintained the required records. Second, she failed to plead circumstances giving rise to an inference of unlawful discrimination. The two faculty members she identified as comparators — also members of the dissertation committee but not punished — were not similarly situated because they did not hold the director role and had different reporting responsibilities. The court also addressed Rathee's allegation that her termination letter was sent on October 31, 2024, the date of Diwali, holding that delivery of a termination letter on a religious holiday alone was insufficient to give rise to an inference of unlawful discrimination.
The ADEA claim failed on two independent grounds. The court applied the same qualification analysis that doomed the Title VII claim. Additionally, Rathee's complaint was entirely silent on the age of her replacement, leaving no factual basis from which the court could infer that she was replaced by someone sufficiently younger to support a discriminatory motive. The court noted that even if she had pled replacement by a younger employee, a bare allegation of that kind would not suffice to state an ADEA claim.
On the FMLA retaliation claim, the court held that Rathee pleaded no facts inferring a causal connection between her leave and her termination. Her proposed fall 2024 teaching schedule was identical to the spring 2024 schedule she had been given before taking leave, and her termination followed her refusal to teach the assigned courses and her failure to respond to multiple communications from university leadership. As for an FMLA interference theory, the court held it was never properly pled — the complaint's single reference to interference appeared in one paragraph stating that Rathee had a federal statutory right under the FMLA to exercise her rights without interference or retaliation, which the court characterized as a threadbare recital of a cause of action's elements, while the remainder of the FMLA section addressed only retaliation.