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According to the school’s tax records, Mike Polisky was paid $1.2 million by Northwestern University for serving as the school’s athletic director for nine days before resigning in 2021.
Sportico reports that Northwestern’s latest tax return, filed last week, reveals Polisky was paid a $750,000 severance in 2022 and another $476,190 in separation pay in 2021.
Mike Polisky was supposed to take over Northwestern’s athletic director position after the university’s previous AD, Jim Phillips, left to become commissioner of the ACC.
After working for more than a decade in the athletic department at Northwestern, Polisky was promoted from his role of deputy athletic director on May 3, 2021 and announced his resignation on May 12, 2021.
The reason for his resignation after less than two weeks was because four months earlier he was one of the defendants named in a sex trafficking lawsuit filed by former Northwestern cheerleader Hayden Richardson.
“We are alarmed by this decision and, indeed, embarrassed on behalf of the university,” six female faculty members wrote in an open letter to Northwestern Provost Kathleen Hagerty after his hiring as AD. “We believe that, at the very least, before Polisky is formally hired, the university must commission and make public an independent, transparent, third-party investigation that demonstrates that Polisky performed his legally mandated duties and acted with integrity when addressing the concerns of the cheerleaders and their allies.”
Hayden Richardson claimed in her lawsuit that “cheerleaders were being presented as sex objects to titillate the men that funded the majority of Northwestern’s athletics programs. After all, the happier these men were, the more money the university would receive from them.”
Last year, Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired amid allegations of hazing and racism, a former volleyball player filed a lawsuit against the university alleging hazing, and baseball coach Jim Foster was fired over alleged abuse of his players.
Meanwhile, amidst all of that, over 1,000 former Northwestern athletes signed a letter defending the university’s athletic culture.