On Aug. 1, 2025, a federal jury empaneled by the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania found Drexel University and the Drexel University College of Medicine not liable in a lawsuit brought by emergency medicine attending physician Sharon Griswold, MD, a former Hahnemann University Hospital and Drexel faculty member.
Griswold had accused Drexel of sex discrimination, retaliation and hostile work environment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, and the Philadelphia Fair Practices Ordinance. A federal judge summarily dismissed the sex discrimination claim before trial, arguing that she did not have enough evidence for a viable case, but allowed the retaliation and hostile work environment claims to move forward.
During the trial, Griswold described a boys’ club in the department that made women uncomfortable, along with a department chair and human resources department who did nothing about it. She claimed that two staff members would continuously and openly support Trump during the 2016 campaign and display hostility towards women. When she tried to talk to her supervisor, he told her to go talk to them about it. HR merely offered to mediate a dispute.
In one dispute, she was forced to get the ombuds involved, which affected her relationship with her department chair and mentor. She was passed over for a promotion to vice chair of academics, a significant stepping stone for advancing to higher-level positions in academic medicine, because she “sues chairs,” a reference to her time at Jefferson when she sued her department chair.
When Hahnemann eventually closed, she was put on administrative leave, rendering her unable to renegotiate her contract to remain a Drexel faculty member. The leave restricted her from communicating with other students, staff and faculty.
According to Griswold, being placed on leave was a pretense for retaliation because other male doctors who had served concurrent Drexel positions were retained as faculty, but despite serving as director of the MS program in medical simulation, she was unable to advocate for herself.
Griswold refused to comment for this article.
Drexel contended that it had continuously supported Griswold throughout her time at Drexel. She was the first full-time female professor of emergency medicine. Her department chair wrote glowing letters of recommendation for her and supported her career at Drexel. She was nominated and selected for a prestigious women’s leadership conference in academic medicine and became associate dean of education at the College of Medicine.
Drexel said that she was instructed to discuss her issues with her colleagues, some of which were routine business decisions like whether to list a position as part-time or full-time, because they were interpersonal conflicts. Other witnesses described her as difficult to work with because she would have “temper tantrums” when she did not get her way.
In court, Griswold claimed that Drexel’s emergency medicine residency program was put on probation because of another male attending physician who would verbally abuse residents, and that he was not expected to change his behavior.
When tensions were high due to Hahnemann’s abruptly announced closure, Drexel presented evidence that Griswold, in an argument, had threatened to burn down the building — which triggered the paid administrative leave and required her to avoid contact with others and barred her from campus. Drexel framed the administrative leave as a matter of public safety, not retaliation.
In a separate lawsuit, Griswold claimed that Drexel violated her copyright rights. After being placed on administrative leave and subsequently losing her job, she had gotten other faculty members to assign their copyright rights to her, allowing her to own the copyright to the course material developed for her MS in medical simulation program.
Intellectual property law typically gives copyrights produced in the line of employment to the employer, but Drexel’s Intellectual Property Policy gives faculty members the right to their course materials except in certain circumstances, such as when it “is intended to maintain instructional continuity in special, exigent circumstances.” The outcome of this lawsuit is unclear.
Ultimately, the federal jury found Drexel not liable for the claims of retaliation and hostile work environment. Drexel will have additional legal challenges next month as it deals with a lawsuit from former Vice President and University Chief Compliance and Privacy Officer Kim P. Gunter, set to go on bench trial the week of Sept. 8, and another lawsuit from Dr. Piety Foley, set to go to a settlement conference on Sept. 15.