The UW Board of Regents did not violate former UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow’s free speech rights when it voted to fire him Wednesday over his production of pornographic films with his wife and porn stars, First Amendment experts say.
But the Universities of Wisconsin administration’s pursuit of revoking Gow’s tenure after they removed him from the chancellorship could be on shakier legal ground.
The regents fired Gow in a unanimous vote on UW system President Jay Rothman’s recommendation after UW system officials were tipped off the week before Christmas about videos published on popular porn websites.
Rothman has also filed a complaint with UW-La Crosse Interim Chancellor Betsy Morgan in an attempt to revoke Gow’s tenure status. The UW system denied the Wisconsin State Journal’s request to see the complaint, citing an ongoing investigation.
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Gow, who was set to retire from his role as chancellor at the end of the academic year and return to a faculty position, has said his firing from the chancellorship is a violation of his free speech rights. He said he should have been able to speak at the regents’ closed-door meeting on Wednesday.
Gow and his wife, Carmen Wilson, have authored books available on Amazon that discuss their sexual lives under pseudonyms, and they create “upscale” pornographic videos through collaborations with porn industry workers. The videos include a series called “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” in which the couple invites porn actors to cook vegan recipes with them while clothed before engaging in sexual acts reserved for the subscription-based porn sites.
Typically, public employees can’t be fired for protected speech, First Amendment expert and UW-Madison professor Howard Schweber said, but there’s an exception for speech that interferes with an employee’s ability to do their job.
“The reasons are much stronger ground — that is, even though this is unquestionably First Amendment protected expression, I think the regents have a pretty good case ... that it would become difficult, if not impossible, for Gow to be effective in the role of chancellor given that he is publicly known to star in pornographic videos that he and his wife market online,” Schweber said.
It gets trickier with the UW system administration’s desire to revoke Gow’s tenure, which, according to his contract, he received from UW-La Crosse’s Communication Studies Department after being named chancellor in November 2006.
The question would largely come down to whether Gow’s videos could be considered a protected form of speech — something that material with pornographic content can be, if it serves a purpose other than purely sexual, First Amendment law expert and UW-Madison professor Anuj Desai said.
“The answer to that question is not as obvious as you might think ... there’s an open question whether or not videos are protected by the First Amendment and whether his actually performing sex acts in those videos — assuming that’s what he’s actually doing — is protected,” Desai said.
Schweber said going after Gow’s tenure presents a slippery slope, attacking protections for what a public employee does on their own time.
Gow was installed as UW-La Crosse’s 10th chancellor in February 2007 and was the second-longest-serving chancellor in the school’s history. The regents have already started a search for Gow’s successor.