Professor UW fired as chancellor for making vegan-themed porn with wife, lawyers up in fight to keep his faculty job

A committee of five faculty peers ultimately recommended Gow’s tenure be revoked, citing a “pattern of behavior demonstrating poor judgment while acting as a visible and recognizable member of the University faculty violated several applicable UW regulations and policies.” This, despite UW’s inability to provide any evidence Gow’s extracurriculars impacted his fitness to teach or that the post-controversy concerns over his minor email and printing infractions weren’t just pretextual.

The Wisconsin Board of Regents will now answer with institutional finality whether Joe’s side hustle makes him unfit to be a professor. In a Sept. 20 hearing in front of the board, he’ll have one last chance to show the law is on his side.

This time, he’ll be joined by an attorney, hired with the help of FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund.

Porn, professors, and academic freedom

The law is clear. The First Amendment fully protects Gow’s hobby and his other personal-time, content-creating sexual exploits with his wife. And quite unlike firing a chancellor, ousting a tenured professor triggers a robust disciplinary process designed precisely to protect the academic freedom and other free speech rights of even the most controversial faculty.

Under Wisconsin law, revoking tenure requires “just cause” determined through a faculty committee hearing. Other schools sometimes define such cause as specific types of misconduct like research fraud or sexual harassment. Harvard, for example, according to a report last year by The Harvard Crimson, has not revoked a tenured faculty appointment in several decades.

Imposing loss of tenure in only the most extreme circumstances aligns with longstanding AAUP guidance on how tenure provides a crucial safeguard for academic freedom. 

“When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings,” the group notes, “they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge.” Tenure, in other words, “provides the conditions for faculty to pursue research and innovation and draw evidence-based conclusions free from corporate or political pressure.”

Tenure also thoroughly protects faculty’s extramural speech — how they express themselves as citizens, off the clock.

“Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for continuing service,” the AAUP stated in its seminal 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

But John K. Wilson, writing for the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, has called extramural utterances “one of the most misunderstood but essential aspects of academic freedom.”

For some perspective, Wilson penned the piece almost exactly a decade ago after University of Illinois trustees voted to revoke a tenured professorship offer to Palestinian-American professor Steven Salaita. Worth underscoring is that Salaita’s crime was something, ten years later, that’s now commonplace in post-Oct. 7 academia: tweeting in defense of Gaza.

“Let’s cut to the chase: If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human being,” Salaita wrote in one post in 2014. “This is not a conflict between #Israel and ‘Hamas,’” read another, “It’s a struggle by an Indigenous people against a colonial power. #Gaza #FreePalestine.”

Salaita sued and the university spent upwards of $2 million defending and settling the case.

Other tenured professors who’ve been fired for controversial, but protected, commentary, have sued universities with similar success.

‘We think if he loses his tenure, it’s a terrible precedent.’

Back at the Gow’s kitchen table, they tell me producing porn is just a small slice of their quiet life at the end of a tree-lined suburban cul-de-sac.

If you’re looking for shock-value, you won’t find it readily with these two. Unless you count a canvas bag of farmshare vegetables almost falling off the counter, or Carmen jumping up and darting onto the patio to chase away the squirrel that’s always sneaking seed from the birdfeeders.

They go to the gym a lot.

Joe was working out at Planet Fitness when he got the idea for “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” from none other than HGTV’s Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines.

“A good-looking couple,” Joe recalled thinking. “Carmen’s as telegenic as she is. Boy, what could we do together? Then I went, ‘Oh, Food Network. Cooking. She’s a great vegan cook.”

They’ve also been buoyed by what they describe as significant community support.

“We’ve had complete strangers come up and say, ‘I support you,’” Carmen said. “We’ve gotten letters in the mail from alumni. One of them was their family Christmas photo, saying, ‘We support you.’”

Two former UWL colleagues reached out to her on Facebook, telling her: “‘No one thinks Joe should lose his tenure. It’s a terrible precedent.’” But, Carmen says one added: “‘Everyone’s too afraid to speak up.’”

Carmen says she understands “how scary that is given what’s happening. These are people who are young in their careers and families. They can’t take the risk.”

Wilson and Gow’s own decision to risk their reputations by going public with their hobby has not been easy on their families, they said, who’ve suffered with the sudden influx of attention.

“There are other ways that people live their lives. You can’t say that, just because it’s not like yours, they’re not qualified to teach.”

“People say, ‘Do you have any regrets?’ We say, ‘No.’ Although the family part, that’s been hard,” Gow said. “In my family, they’re not real happy about this. My mom is from a world where it’s just…

“Sex isn’t done,” finishes Carmen, who tears up talking about how her daughter initially cut off contact when the scandal broke. For a time, she lost access to the nanny cam that gave her glimpses of her grandchildren who live out of state. 

The couple are also frustrated that even widespread reporting — a Business Insider reporter shadowed them for three days and Nightline had just been there to film — has failed to capture the whole story. Headlines and punchlines are easy. Harder to convey is the extent to which plant-based eating and their production of adult content has strengthened their marriage in important ways — ways Joe and Carmen just don’t want to have to hide.

“That’s our whole odyssey. How can we have other people involved in our relationship but in a way that is gonna bring us closer together,” Gow said. “Being that this is her third marriage, this is my second. We were like, ‘Well, we wanna have an exciting sexuality. Let’s try some different things.’”

Joe says fighting to keep his faculty job at UWL isn’t about getting people to bless his lifestyle outside the classroom. It’s about having the right to live authentically. Something he says he always promoted for others at UW LaCrosse as chancellor. 

“I was an administrator for a long time. From time to time, students would come to me, and they’d say:  ‘My teacher is weird, and I’m not comfortable.’”

Joe would ask what they meant. Perhaps the professor was openly gay, or from another culture, or had a heavy accent.

“Well, yeah,” Joe would tell the student. “There are other ways that people live their lives. You can’t say that, just because it’s not like yours, they’re not qualified to teach.’”