Perhaps they should have seen this coming.
In 2018, after University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow invited onscreen prostitute Nina Hartley to speak on campus for “Free Speech Week,” he lost his raise. Ray Cross, the University of Wisconsin System president at the time, criticized the chancellor for exercising “poor judgment.”
UW System officials have recently learned that Gow was making and distributing pornographic videos with his wife Carmen Wilson and fellow peddlers — including Hartley and a pornographer by the name of Will Pounder.
Gow, 63, is no longer chancellor of UW-La Crosse.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously fired him last week. System President Jay Rothman said Gow has subjected the university to “significant reputational harm.”
Gow asks, what’s the big deal? The disgraced administrator claims a First Amendment right to follow his “passion” in his spare time. Gow argues the regents appear to have violated his due-process rights.
First Amendment experts say Gow is barking up the wrong tree. Critics of the UW System’s unhinged “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) cult assert Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded higher education system is reaping what it is sowing: systemic depravity.
‘A Scandal Would Ensue’
Gow doesn’t deny his sexual escapades. In fact, he has said he would like the opportunity to explain and defend his “hobby.” The former chancellor and his wife, who served as an unpaid assistant to Gow on campus, pseudonymously published a couple of books detailing their personal kink. But their photos are on the books and social sites. Suffice to say, Gow and Wilson are both clearly identified in their sex videos.
In their book, Monogamy with Benefits: How Porn Enriches Our Relationship, the couple notes how deeply they are “entrenched in the local establishment” and acknowledge that “a scandal would ensue if our peers were to know what we’ve been doing.” Indeed.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, Gow and Wilson have six videos on the sex-peddling website OnlyFans that feature fellow onscreen prostitutes.
“They also appear on at least two other porn websites, PornHub and XHamster,” according to the newspaper.
The couple also reportedly got their freak on, on a YouTube channel billed as “Sexy Health Cooking” in which they prepare an array of vegan dishes with fellow purveyors of sex acts.
Reached by The Federalist, Gow said he wished he could comment but his attorney has advised him and his wife to take a break from speaking further to the media while “we explore our next steps.” He’s weighing his legal options.
The porn-producing university administrator had much to say to the press before shifting to silence. Gow told the Journal Sentinel that, as the newspaper put it, “exploring consensual adult sexuality” through the creation of pornographic videos and books is protected under the First Amendment. He says he’s been doing it in secret for about a decade but as of late he opted to “be a little bit more open about these free speech issues.”
“There’s nothing said about the University of Wisconsin; there’s nothing said about the chancellor (on the videos),” he told the publication. “So someone else would have to make those associations. And then someone would have to say those are problematic.”
Oh, they’re problematic.
‘Detrimental to His Public Role’
First Amendment attorneys say Gow probably doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.
Ken White, founding partner at California-based law firm Brown, White & Osborn, in a recent substack post notes that First Amendment protections for government employees involve a “complicated analysis of whether the speech is part of the employee’s job, whether it’s on a matter of public interest, and whether the government employer’s interest in preventing disruption outweighs the employee’s interest in speaking.”
But in short, Gow is screwed.
“In balance, he’s probably not protected in his job as chancellor” because Gow’s public sexual proclivities present no public concern, as the U.S. Supreme Court has opined, White said. In 2004, the high court held that a San Diego police officer wasn’t exercising his First Amendment rights on a matter of public concern by selling pornographic videos of himself. He was fired.
“Even if a court found that Mr. Gow’s pornographic videos represented speech on a matter of public concern, it would likely find that the university could fire him on the grounds that appearing in the videos was detrimental to his public role and therefore to the university,” White wrote in his First Amendment law blog, The Popehat Report.
Gow’s salacious activities appear to be detrimental to the university under his contract. While said document encourages a chancellor to “engage in outside activities that contribute to the Chancellor’s professional advancement or benefit the university,” it frowns on engaging in “any activity that may be adverse to … the interests of the University of Wisconsin System.” Public porn is Exhibit A.
“We are alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions, which were wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor,” Board of Regents President Karen Walsh said in a statement.
‘New Religion on the Left’
But should Walsh be so alarmed? Are Gow’s “actions” inconsistent with a public university system whose flagship UW-Madison once celebrated an art exhibit titled “Free Porn on ‘Your Tube.’” As the MacIver Institute reported, the painting depicts a pregnant woman being sodomized by an oil pipeline — part of an exhibition of leftist art attacking Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office in 2017.
And who could forget Dr. Sami Schalk, a University of Wisconsin-Madison gender and women’s studies associate professor, internet famous for twerking semi-nude while wearing an N-95 mask on stage at a rap concert. Schalk also cheered Marxist Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020 and asked riot attendees not to “video tape folks doing anything illegal.”
Conservative lawmakers tell The Federalist that Gow’s porn production is the byproduct of the system’s far-left DEI agenda, which has been “inclusive” of all manner of depravity. UW-Madison is home to and one of the more vocal proponents of transgender surgeries and child mutilations in America in the radical name of “gender diverse youth.”
The UW Board of Regents, joined by Wisconsin’s leftist governor, Tony Evers, fought tooth and nail against the Republican-led legislature’s push to scale back funding for the sweeping DEI agenda. The system last month turned down $800 million in state funding to protect the radical movement and its 130 DEI coordinators.
“DEI is the new religion to the left,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said last year. “They don’t go to church on Sunday, but they have no problem using taxpayer dollars to evangelize on every college campus across the state. We have to stop, put our foot down and not allow it to continue.”
Apparently, chancellor porn is — at least for now — a bridge too far for some university leaders of the left’s new church. Rothman, president of Wisconsin’s university system, recently responded to Gow’s free-speech claims.
“Good judgment requires that there are and must be limits on what is said or done by the individuals entrusted to lead our communities,” he said. “We expect our chancellors, as the leaders of these great institutions, to be role models for our students, staff, and faculty as well for the communities we are privileged to serve.”
It wasn’t long ago, however, that Rothman was lauding Gow, who last summer announced plans to step down as chancellor at the end of the current school year. Gow, at the time, said he planned to stay on at the university as a communications professor.
“This is a hallmark of excellent stewardship,” Rothman said in an August statement. “He has provided a steady hand through challenging times and met the moment when we needed him.”
White, the First Amendment attorney, said taxpayers could be on the hook for Gow’s hefty pension and related benefits in Wisconsin’s generous retirement system, depending on the terms of his contract. UW System officials did not answer The Federalist’s questions about whether Gow would be allowed to draw the benefits following his firing.
White said Gow has a stronger argument for holding a teaching position.
“Professors are expected to do all kinds of nutty things,” the First Amendment law expert said.
