Statement on Kenneth Marcus's resignation from Dept. of Ed. following complaint

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Palestine Legal staff attorney Zoha Khalili issued the following statement on the resignation of Kenneth Marcus from the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights:

"Over the past two years, Kenneth Marcus has not only harmed campus advocates for Palestinian rights—as we detailed in an inspector general complaint in May—but has also made it harder for survivors of sexual assault to seek justice and support and harder for colleges to promote gender and racial equity and inclusion. We are relieved that he will no longer be able to abuse the Office for Civil Rights, but we know we have a long road ahead to undo the damage that he and the rest of the administration have done.”

Marcus indicated in his resignation that he would be returning to private life. The Brandeis Center, a right-wing anti-Palestinian group he founded in 2012 through which he carried out his agenda of undermining Palestine advocacy on campuses, announced that he would be returning as chairman of their board. 

In late May, Palestine Legal and eight other civil rights groups—American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Civil Liberties Defense Center, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defending Rights & Dissent, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, and Project South—filed a complaint with the Department of Education Acting Inspector General Sandra Bruce demanding that her office investigate Kenneth Marcus for violations of federal law.  

The complaint lays out evidence that Marcus violated the law in his handling of a case against Rutgers University by providing special treatment to the complainant, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). The ZOA is a right-wing Israel lobby group that Marcus had closely collaborated with prior to taking his role in the Trump administration.

Marcus’s appointment to the Department of Education and a December 2019 executive order inspired an uptick in threats and actual filings of civil rights complaints by pro-Israel organizations against campus activism and scholarship on Palestine. 

Marcus himself promoted the tactic of using civil rights complaints to intimidate student activists as president of a right-wing anti-Palestinian group. 

Read more about Marcus's anti-civil rights agenda here.