Porn Professor Canned by University of Wisconsin

On Friday, Joe Gow, the professor turned porn star, and his wife and co-star, Carmen Wilson, held hands as they prepared to hear whether the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents would allow him to stay on as a professor.

Gow, you may recall, had been the longest-serving chancellor in the university system’s recent history, but was booted from that position when he began posting videos of himself and his wife having sex. Still, he believed that the First Amendment gave him the right to express his sexuality without losing his tenured position as a university professor.

The board, however, disagreed. The vote to fire him was 17–0. 

“I keep learning the same lesson with these folks, which is that they’re not as committed to free speech as they claim to be,” Gow told me, adding that the university system’s commitment to free speech was one of the reasons he came to Wisconsin almost 18 years ago. 

“This isn’t a Board of Regents,” he said. “It’s a board of hypocrites.”

There was no debate, no wrestling with the issues surrounding free speech. In the space of a few minutes, Gow, 63, lost his tenured position teaching communications at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse—plus more than $300,000 in unused sick leave. It was the culmination of a ten month–long standoff between Gow and the university that all began last December, shortly after the former administrator decided to upload his extracurricular—and highly pornographic—content to sites like OnlyFans. 

“Let’s try something a little unusual,” Gow remembers thinking when he posted the videos, uploaded under the alias “Sexy Happy Couple.” 

He wasn’t expecting much—“here we are, middle-aged, average-looking people,” he said—but the response was “stunning.” Thousands of viewers started watching—one of whom later notified the university that it had a porn star on the premises. A few days before Christmas the fun ended when, in a Zoom call, an HR representative asked if the videos belonged to him. Ever since, he’s been in a drawn-out hearing process, beginning with a faculty committee at University of Wisconsin–La Crosse that recommended that he be fired from his teaching position in July, and ending with Friday’s decision by the regents. But Gow, who’s joined by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in considering this a violation of his First Amendment rights, says this is only “the beginning.”

“We’ll pursue this as long as we have to,” he said. “Americans should not be deprived of their right to express themselves in the way that they want to.”

Olivia Reingold is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold and read her original piece about Joe Gow, “Professor by Day, Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?”

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