Polisky hiring process was doomed from the start

Northwestern offers a Master’s degree program in sports administration. Those professors now have a case study they can use for all future classes.

Northwestern’s just concluded – and now restarted – athletic director hiring process should be studied and dissected for generations because the Wildcat administration did just about everything wrong to botch the process.

The end result was that on Wednesday, nine days after he was named Northwestern’s athletic director, Mike Polisky resigned his position after blowback that was entirely expected – yet for which the administration somehow seemed completely unprepared.

It was a fitting end for a process that seemed doomed from the start.

Polisky was hired on May 3, despite the fact that he was named as a defendant, along with the school, in a lawsuit filed in December by a Northwestern cheerleader who accused the university of not properly handling complaints about her and her teammates being sexually exploited. He was also called out by a Black cheerleader in a Daily Northwestern story for racial discrimination.

The negative reaction was immediate and intense. A protest over the weekend on campus drew more than 400 people, including the mayor of Evanston. Faculty members wrote an open letter to school president Morty Schapiro calling for a third-party investigation into whether Polisky sufficiently addressed the cheerleaders’ allegations. Op-eds were written in everything from student publications to The Washington Post.

On the other side, several NU coaches reacted by tweeting their support for Polisky. A letter in favor of Polisky was posted on Twitter on Wednesday that was signed by more than 140 alumni, donors, and former and current athletes.

The firestorm was too much for Polisky to bear, and he resigned his position.

“Over the last 10 days, it has become clear to me that the current challenges will not allow me to effectively lead our department, especially during these unsettling times in college athletics,” Polisky said in a statement. “My love and respect for Northwestern and for our student-athletes, coaches and staff is greater than my own desire to lead the department.

“I do not want to be a distraction to our incredible men and women as they pursue a collective goal — to help our student-athletes become the best they can be. While my family and I are disappointed, I move forward knowing this is the right decision.”

Ironically, Polisky’s resignation may have been the best move made by a Northwestern administration employee throughout the whole ordeal.

You can’t blame Polisky for where Northwestern sits right now, with egg on its collective face, after a ham-handed hiring process that made them look like rank amateurs. He just took the job he was offered. The blame falls on Schapiro, first and foremost, but also the trustees and the search committee.

From the mysterious search for candidates, to the curious choice of a man who was named in a lawsuit, to the failure to anticipate a negative reaction, to the lack of communication, Northwestern demonstrated at every turn how not to hire an athletic director.

There was no transparency in a search process that seemed to be clouded in secrecy. ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg reported an impressive list of candidates that included sitting ADs like Pat Chun from Washington State, Jim Knowlton from Cal and Desiree Reed-Francois from UNLV.

Yet none of those names showed up on the list of finalists. They were Polisky, former NU basketball player and sports executive Anucha Browne Sanders, Duke deputy AD Nina King and interim NU AD Janna Blais.

For an opening that was trumpeted as one of the premier AD jobs in America – the pressure was relatively low, it was in a great location and it paid extremely well (Jim Phillips was the second-highest paid AD in the country, according to reports) – it was a rather underwhelming list.

Yet, instead of the statement hire that many were hoping for, Northwestern went with the only man on the list — and the only one who also happened to be named in a sexual harassment lawsuit at the school. No matter how qualified Polisky was, it was a move that raised eyebrows in this #MeToo era, even if NU filed to dismiss the suit the week before and said they were satisfied that Polisky violated no Title IX rules.

While Polisky may have been a surprising choice, even more stunning was the lack of preparation for the criticism that ensued. Northwestern announced Polisky as AD but didn’t hold a press conference. Schapiro, we were told, was out of town.

Instead of getting the genial Polisky in front of a microphone to explain his past and his vision for the future of Northwestern athletics, there was silence.

Not surprisingly, the media and students started filling that void.

Students, particularly women and minorities, felt marginalized. Coaches and administrators, who all seemed to like Polisky after more than a decade of working with him, were angry. Many athletes were caught in the middle.

Schapiro issued a letter defending Polisky a few days later, saying he demonstrated the “highest standard of conduct and character.” It didn’t help. They still avoided holding a press conference, letting Polisky’s fate get decided on social media.

So on Wednesday, six days after the letter and five days after the campus protests, Polisky decided he had had enough and pulled the plug on his own term.

Now, they won’t need that press conference at all.

Schapiro – in another statement, of course – also announced on Wednesday that professor Robert Gundlach would serve as the interim athletic director as they restart their search. Gundlach, who also held a similar interim post in 2008, is Northwestern's faculty athletics representative to the NCAA and Big Ten.

“In the coming months, I will share information on the process for selecting our next athletic director,” said Schapiro. We can hope that he learned from his mistakes and will be much more above-board this time around.

Of course, what AD candidates are still interested in the job after this dumpster fire remains to be seen.