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

• The Wisconsin Board of Regents will weigh revoking professor Joe Gow’s long-held tenure on Friday.
• FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund helped Gow find legal representation.
• Joe and wife Carmen say they’re fighting for both academic freedom and the right to live authentically.

Stripped of its X-rated content on YouTube, “Sexy Healthy Cooking (With Porn Stars!)” could pass — at least at first — for something on Food Network: High production value. Glossy studio kitchen. Charismatic husband-and-wife hosts.

“This is just a quick overview of the cooking show,” says Carmen Wilson, the wife, flipping open her computer to play the show’s trailer for me at her suburban Wisconsin dining table on a recent summer day.

“She’s Carmen. He’s Joe. And we are the ‘Sexy Happy Couple,’” the hosts say in unison in the trailer, “and this is ‘Sexy Healthy Cooking,’ your go-to show for plant-based food.”

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Joe is Joe Gow, the longtime University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse media professor who held a dual role as chancellor for 17 years. That is, until November when the university discovered the Gows’ spent their personal time moonlighting as plant-fuelled porn stars and UWL fired Joe as chancellor two days after Christmas. 

For YouTube audiences, “Sexy Healthy Cooking” — even “(With Porn Stars!)” — is barely spicier than the Kung Pao tofu dish Carmen whips up with veteran adult film star and sex educator Nina Hartley.

As Joe explains in the clip, “We also like to have a guest star from the adult entertainment industry, to talk a little bit about food and lifestyle.”

For Joe and Carmen, it’s all about demonstrating that vegan cooking is the recipe for strong relationships.

There’s Lauren Phillips, sex industry news outlet XBIZ’s MILF Performer of the Year, clapping over a sweet and smoky soy curl vegan pizza. “Sounds yummy,” Phillips coos. “I can’t wait to try!”

Will “The Pounder” Pounder is presented with vegan green chili enchiladas and can’t believe it’s not chicken. “Outta plant food?” he asks with an incredulous wave. “Get outta here!”

Eventually, there’s Joe raising a suggestive eyebrow at AVN Hall of Famer India Summer. “That looks so good, I think it’s a great time to show you all the scene that we shot yesterday. I think you’re gonna like it. We had quite a physical workout there.”

But at least initially, if one wanted to see the full extent of Gow and Wilson’s veg-fuelled virility “(with Porn Stars!),” you’d have to pay and verify your age on sites like OnlyFans and LoyalFans where, early last November the couple began uploading full episodes of “Sexy Healthy Cooking.”

“We [thought], let’s be a little more experimental and put these videos out,” Joe told me, “and see what happens.”

Within weeks, they also started putting X-rated videos featuring just the two of them on free public adult sites like PornHub and xHamster.

For Joe and Carmen, it’s all about demonstrating that vegan cooking is the recipe for strong relationships.

“Invariably the question we get asked is how did you discover this curious hobby,” Joe said, adding that both he and Carmen got together after leaving broken marriages. “It was just a matter of, hey, we’ve been around the block. We’re not young people. Let’s just talk openly about what we’re interested in.”

Can Wisconsin faculty live authentically? The Board of Regents decides next week.

The University of Wisconsin however, has suggested the couple’s brand of sexuality should remain behind closed doors.

The chair of the Wisconsin System Board told The New York Times after Gow lost his chancellor role in December, that the board was “alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions.” Administrators seized Gow’s work computers and hired Husch Blackwell lawyers and FTI Consulting — the group that worked on Bush v. Gore and the Bernie Madoff scandal — to inspect the devices. 

The investigation, according to the university’s report, found Gow once printed a vegan cookbook on a UWL printer. Emails advertising sex toys, which Gow explains were unsolicited, were sent to his work email.

Meanwhile, the media firestorm touched off by the peculiarity of a Midwestern porn star professor has been unrelenting, with coverage suggesting split opinions.

“Don’t Fire People for Making Pornography in Their Free Time,” wrote The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersforf in January. The local brewery sold out of its special-issue “Hot for Chancellor” fruited sour that month in just over 30 minutes. When Gow and Wilson showed up to buy some a few days later, the owner gave them the cans he’d set aside for himself. Students came to Gow’s defense too.

“He was a [private] citizen when he made those videos,” UWL political science major Easton Moberg told The Daily Beast. “I don’t like to see that punished.”

“It’s definitely not illegal,” UWL Sophomore Jason Mergen told The Wisconsin State Journal, which also reported on a petition to reinstate Gow. “He’s a good dude.”

But UWL administrators disagree, claiming Gow damaged the university’s reputation and that several donors have threatened to withhold donations if Gow is not fired. State lawmakers also put pressure on the university to do something about him.

By June Gow was representing himself at a public hearing on the issue of whether he should keep his tenure. He challenged the university’s claims that his activities caused serious reputational harm, noting enrollment and donations to the school had not decreased over the course of the months-long investigation.

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.”

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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.’”