A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a race discrimination charge filed by a fired university employee, questioning why a lower court dismissed it without addressing the issue in its ruling.

Emily Lewis began working as a director of instructional design at Indiana Wesleyan University, a private Christian university in Marion, Indiana, in 2017, according to Friday’s ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in Emily Lewis v. Indiana Wesleyan University.

In July 2018, Ms. Lewis met with two university officials to discuss her concerns that her subordinates, all of whom were white, did not take direction from her because of her race.

One of the officials told her she should get “Black woman syndrome off of (her) shoulders” and that she was “too smart,” the ruling said. She reported this conversation to the official who did not make the remark and the university’s chancellor.

In February 2019 she was told by another university official, who according to the record was not aware of her discrimination complaint, that her position was being eliminated as part of combining her department with another. She refused the offer of a research assistant position and stopped working at the university.

Ms. Lewis filed suit against the university in U.S. District Court in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on charges including retaliation and discrimination.  The lower court granted the university summary judgment on her retaliation charges but did not address her race discrimination claim.

The three-judge appeals court panel reinstated the discrimination claim, saying the district court had “failed to explain why it was granting summary judgment on Dr. Lewis’s claim that her termination was racially discriminatory.”

“As a result, we cannot be sure that the district court adequately considered the merits of that claim,” the ruling said, in affirming dismissal of the retaliation claims, but declining to evaluate her race discrimination claim and remanding the case for further proceedings on that issue.

Attorneys in the case did not respond to requests for comment.