LA CROSSE, Wis. — Only hours after the Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents took the unusually extreme step of firing veteran communications professor Joe Gow — stripping him of tenure for creating and appearing in adult content — XBIZ spoke exclusively with him about his case.
As XBIZ reported earlier on Friday, Gow said in a statement, “The regents claim to want to protect and promote free expression, but their action today shows this isn’t true. Late last year, when they fired me as chancellor, they said it was because the books and videos my wife Carmen and I posted on the internet were ‘abhorrent’ and ‘disgusting.’ And now, after a long and fraudulent process, they have fired me as a tenured faculty member, as well.”
Gow’s statement also indicated his intention to continue defending his rights “in a court of law, before an impartial judge or jury.”
Our conversation with Gow follows. It was conducted by phone on Friday afternoon and edited for publication.
XBIZ: It seems like the extreme reaction of the Universities of Wisconsin authorities may have something to do with your refusal to agree with them that you had done something wrong by being open and public about your sexual content?
Joe Gow: That’s right, and we’re not going to do that. So that’s why we’ll end up in court with this.
XBIZ: You were until recently an integral part of the machinery of the same university system that is now coming after you. You were not only a professor, but also a veteran administrator. So you must be familiar with what a standard disciplinary situation would look like and why this one is so unusual.
Gow: That’s what’s so extraordinary about this situation. I know the attorneys who are working for the UW system quite well, because I collaborated with them. I was chancellor for 17 years, and so I know how they think and I know how they work.
Usually what happens is that there’s a faculty person who’s done something genuinely wrong: they’ve harmed somebody, they’ve sexually harassed somebody, or even, for example, we had a cadaver lab at the university that didn’t take care of the cadavers in a professional way. These are things that people do where you actually need to take action.
What these attorneys typically do is threaten that person and get them to hire their own attorney and spend thousands of dollars, and then just reach a point where it’s easier to just say, ‘Okay, I’m going to retire or resign and leave.’ So I knew their game, and I didn’t play it. I said, I’m going to hang in there.
And then the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), very graciously, provided an attorney. The system administration and the right-wing people were just hoping that I would just leave, and I’m not. So here we are.
XBIZ: During a typical academic year, how many professors get stripped of tenure?
Gow: So that never happens, never. The lawyers for the administration cited only three other cases in a 20-year period in the whole Universities of Wisconsin system.
One person had sabotaged the research projects of their colleagues. The other person took students on field trips overnight and got drunk and slept in their room and masturbated. The third person recorded confidential personnel meetings and put the tapes on the internet.
All three were cases where these people had done something harmful and there were victims. It was wrong, it was clear, and so they lost their tenure. Three cases total in 20 years.
My case is very distinct in that there is no victim, and the person that filed the complaint is the president of the universities system himself.
XBIZ: How does your case fit within the culture of what’s happening in this system of public universities right now, and in the political landscape in Wisconsin right now?
Gow: There’s a political dimension to this. When I came back in 2007, the governor was Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and the Board of Regents were all appointed by him. They were very hands-off and respected what we did. Then when Scott Walker, a very right-wing Republican, got elected governor, he started appointing people who proposed to weaken tenure and shared governance and reduce funding. And even though we now have a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who’s fantastic, the Board of Regents is still kind of a blend of his appointees and Scott Walker’s appointees.
XBIZ: That’s the board that hired the current president, Jay Rothman, who called your actions — including posting adult videos with your wife online — “abhorrent,” right?
Gow: Yes, though Rothman came not from higher education, but from a big Wisconsin law firm, Foley & Lardner, and he has brought this desire to appease the far-right people that control the Wisconsin assembly. The state is very divided politically. We have a Democratic governor, but the State Senate and the Assembly, the majorities are Republicans, and so Rothman has been in for two years now, and he is kind of new. He may have cut deals with the Republican leadership to cut DEI efforts, for example, and since he has to redo the biennial budget, every two years the speaker, Robin Vos, may say to Rothman, “OK, I want you to do this or we’re not going to give you your funding.”
My situation falls in this category of these far-right people — and they went on record about how the feel about my case. State Senator Rob Hutton, who’s the chair of the Education Committee, and another state senator, Stephen Nass, said that if I had been making adult entertainment with my wife, I should be fired not only as chancellor, but altogether, as a professor.
What we’re seeing here today is the system president and the Board of Regents saying “We don’t want to get a lot of grief from the far right, because we want to get our funding. So let’s just fire this guy entirely and risk a lawsuit, but we’ll do what the politicians want.”
XBIZ: How about reports of pressure from wealthy donors to fire you?
Gow: I think that’s bunk. You know, when I was chancellor, all the time there would be people who’d say, “Hey, I’m a donor and I won’t give you any more money if you don’t get a new track coach, or I don’t like the fact that the religious groups on campus aren’t given more office space.” Usually that’s somebody who’s giving you, like, $20 or $30 a year, and it’s not consequential.
People don’t give on the basis of who’s on the staff. Sure, there’s a guy who has a minimal scholarship in Communication Studies, and he is a religious person, and he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I’m not going to keep up the scholarship if they keep him on.” But I think that’s just a lot of talk.
XBIZ: In 2018 you brought in Nina Hartley to speak and you also faced backlash then from the University. What do you think the difference is between that and the current, much bigger situation?
Gow: That invitation came right when the Board of Regents passed this document about their commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression. So with great fanfare, the regents passed this policy and said, “Yeah, we’re going to wrap ourselves in the flag of free expression, free speech. We want you chancellors to promote free speech on your campus.” And free speech week is the first week of October, and I thought, “Well, let’s do something that really is challenging.”
There are programs from time to time on sexual education. The place to talk to young people about sexuality is certainly on a campus, and so we invited Nina Hartley to come and speak. And she did, and when the regents found out about it and the previous system president, Ray Cross, they denounced me and said that it was terrible.
I showed them that although they say they’re for free speech, they’re really not, when it comes to sexuality. So that really got a lot of people angry, and a lot of the right-wingers.
That full story was never really told. Two of the regents called me up and said, “If you don’t pay the $5,000 speaking fee out of your own pocket, we’re going to fire you.” That was a textbook example of chilling speech and telling me, “We can’t have this kind of material.”
And I’ll admit that once the current situation came around to me, I was remembering how I felt that I had almost sold out with the Nina Hartley visit, and I probably shouldn’t have caved and paid the money and issued a kind of apology. And so this time I said, “You know, we’re going to take a stand.”
And so that’s what brings us to this point today.
XBIZ: On a more personal note, what compelled you to create and publish this adult content?
Gow: This was a hobby that my wife and I have enjoyed for over a decade. Initially, we did it in secret, and we really didn’t plan to put it out into the world. And then my wife had some very bad experiences with her positions at various universities, and finally one of them actually closed. And I got to the point where I was chancellor for over 16 years, and I said, “You know, I’ve done all I want to do there, so I want to retire as chancellor, and go back to the faculty.”
So we thought, "Why don’t we put the videos out into the world and just kind of get a sense of what happens?" And I think we kind of thought, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” As you guys know, the people in the industry are very honorable, and they would never out anyone. And so we put the videos on OnlyFans and LoyalFans, and basically nobody really cared about them. There were like, two or three followers.
One day, we were talking to our editor, who works for a big professional studio, and he told us we could have a lot of success on the free sites, like Pornhub and xHamster. We had no idea if anybody was going to really care about these videos. I mean, it’s two middle-aged people, it’s not really anything dramatic.
So we put them on Pornhub and xHamster, and remarkably — particularly on xHamster — people really liked them. They went from 1,000 views a day to 10,000 views a day and before you know it, these videos had 300,000 views in a few weeks. We weren’t expecting that.
XBIZ: To what do you attribute that unexpected success?
Gow: People found appeal in an amateur couple, real people, though the production values are studio-quality, and you don’t really see that every day. It’s real passion. It was just the two of us, those videos on the free sites, no other performers. So in just a very short time, we had, in total, over a million views on five videos, and we were very surprised by that.
And that’s when somebody turned us in to the people at the UW system, and they called me and said, “Are these your videos?” And I said, “Yeah, they are, you know. And what about it? They’re personal productions. They’re not university things.” And they were very interested in whether we make any money from the videos because as a public official in Wisconsin, if I make over $1,000 from some other source in a year, I have to report that. But the only thing we made any money on was our two books on Amazon, and it was always under $1,000 a year. As you know, you have to have millions and millions and millions of views to make good money on the free sites, so we had not made very much money, even though the videos were getting to be popular.
That was a turning point when I was like, “Well, now they know about this. What are they going to do about it?”
I guess I expected they would say that since I had announced I want to retire as chancellor, I needed to speed that up, and then I would need to retire as faculty as well, and resolve this without much fanfare.
Instead, they just announced, “We’re firing this guy as chancellor because of these ‘abhorrent and disgusting’ videos,” and then they launched this investigation to try to fire me as a tenured faculty member. And that was about 10 months ago, and today they succeeded in that.
XBIZ: Do you recall, during your time as an administrator, instances of faculty engaging in sexual relations with students and colleagues, and how that was handled?
Gow: There was a case a few years ago of an art professor who was accused of having a young woman student come into a room, and he told her, “Now I’m going to teach you how to draw the nude body, and so you need to take your shirt off.” And she was very uncomfortable with that, and filed a report, and it took a while to investigate that. That one was very public.
There was another case that didn’t get any publicity, where a student, 10 years after she graduated, felt that she needed to clear her conscience and tell us, maybe so that it didn’t happen again, that there was a professor who accused her of plagiarism on an assignment and had her come up to his office and perform oral sex on him to make it go away. And that guy resigned before we could do anything about it.
There are other cases where a faculty member wrote erotic emails to a young woman student, and he was confronted with that, and he then quickly retired.
So there are cases where people genuinely are doing bad things, but there’s a victim, and it’s appropriate to take action there. As I said earlier, in our case, there’s no victim. I mean, the only people who’ve really been hurt by this are my wife and me. We lost our health benefits and I lost my job.
XBIZ: Back in the early 2000s, there were cases of prominent professors who hit on students repeatedly, and universities would give them a year sabbatical, often somewhere tropical, to “chill out.” What has changed?
Gow: That’s the way it used to work. “Well, we need you to go away.” I think because of #MeToo, there’s now much more seriousness about all this, and people can’t pull that same kind of thing. And I think that’s fine. That’s as it should be, if the sexuality is not consensual, or if it involves a power imbalance. That shouldn’t happen. But again, in our case, there’s nothing like that at all.
XBIZ: Another way your case seems peculiar is that the religious conservatives who are coming for you should love your content: a loving married couple. Isn’t that precisely what they like? Isn’t that the only sex they approve of?
Gow: That is exactly right, I think. And I think that kind of confounds them. They want this to fit a different narrative. But the reality is, this is a married couple. Neither of us, Carmen nor me, could do this on our own. We do it together, and that’s what makes it special.
Main Image: Carmen Wilson and Joe Gow
