Misery loves company, and for the past 19 months, American colleges have had plenty of both, largely thanks to Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, who has spent her entire tenure treating campuses like crime scenes.

Dhillon undid years of diversity, equity, and inclusion work at more than 300 colleges by launching aggressive investigations, lawsuits, and pressure campaigns. Now she’s leaving because she didn’t get a promotion.

Dhillon had become increasingly frustrated that she had not been promoted to a higher post, MS NOW reported. She told the administration before the midterms that she planned to step down after the election.

“Serving my country as AAG for Civil Rights has been the honor of a lifetime,” Dhillon wrote Thursday on X. “We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more.”

She’s being modest. Under Dhillon, the Justice Department stopped investigating accusations of systemic racism or sexism and declined to investigate ICE officers’ fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year. Tasked with protecting the rights of people with disabilities, Dhillon has also used the r-word in casual social media posts. 

Dhillon also turned the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department—created to repair the injustices of Jim Crow—into a relentless legal sledgehammer aimed at universities with programs that uplifted marginalized groups.

Since starting the job in April 2025, Dhillon has bragged about opening more than 100 investigations into university admissions practices, accusing colleges of discrimination for maintaining race-conscious programs and of antisemitism for allowing pro-Palestinian activism on campus. 

In a way, she was wildly successful. Since 2024, more than 300 campuses have eliminated DEI requirements, closed DEI offices, removed diversity statements from hiring processes, and changed or removed their DEI policies.

“She has corrupted [the Civil Rights Division’s] mission,” Vanita Gupta, a former head of the DOJ civil rights division under President Joe Biden, told the New York Times in August. 

The repercussions of Dhillon’s efforts “will be felt for decades and decades,” Nina Beattie, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told the Boston Globe in March. “All of the advances that we’ve made in civil rights and equality over the years, they’ve just now been pushed back decades.”

At her alma mater, the University of Virginia, Dhillon opened a slew of investigations that prompted the university president—a law school classmate of hers who led efforts to diversify the student body—to resign. Perhaps her most high-profile foe has been Harvard University, which has repeatedly challenged the DOJ’s lawsuits as other universities capitulated. This spring, Dhillon sued Harvard twice in the span of six weeks, accusing the university of tolerating antisemitism and withholding race-related admissions data from the government. 

Federal judges dismissed both suits. 

Dhillon is the first senior official out the door since Democrats trounced the GOP in races up and down the ballot this week. She may not be the last. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly weighing whether to call it quits, too. 

This post was shared from Mother Jones.