Kenneth L. Marcus, the Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, has announced he will leave the post, leaving behind a mixed record of upholding the rights of students from preschool through college, according to The New York Times.

While he was roundly credited with creating policies that would protect the rights of Jewish students and completing a set of rules for dealing with sexual misconduct on campuses, Marcus often met push-back from career lawyers and educators within his agency for pushing personal and political agenda instead of fulfilling agency goals.

For example, Marcus ceased the agency practice of collecting data on critical civil rights categories and instead directed agency resources to investigate sometimes spurious claims of religious discrimination.

Appointed in 2018, Marcus immediately overturned Obama-era recommendation that schools should consider race to diversify their student populations.  The issue of racial diversity in admissions has routinely been upheld within the Courts, but the Departments of Education and Justice under Trump have been less supportive of the practice.

In recent months, Marcus has faced two separate complaints filed with the Department of Education Inspector General.  In one, Marcus is accused of overriding department lawyers, who saw no legal basis for challenging a Connecticut rule allowing transgender girls to participate in girls sports programs.

The other complaint, brought by nine civil rights groups, questioned Marcus’s ability to reopen a settled anti-Semitism case that had been filed against Rutgers University in which Marcus used a self-created definition of anti-Semitism to support a new inquiry.

Marcus wrote a definition of anti-Semitism that included protesting of policies put into place by the government of Israel by Palestinian students on US campuses.

“It is clear that he was never neutral,” said Liz King, the program director for education at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Ken Marcus’s civil rights agenda was always his own, and students paid dearly for his time in office.”