The professor made porn. His firing may shape the future of free speech.

The university tried to prove that Gow had damaged its reputation, claiming that several top donors had threatened to stop giving if the star of “Bedroom Shenanigans” was allowed to teach undergrads. Harrison also placed Gow’s memoirs on trial. He recited a passage in which Gow — under the nom de plume Jay Hart — hires “Tom,” a male stripper, “to perform sex acts” with his wife.

“In ‘Monogamy with Benefits’ you wrote that all events described are true,” Harrison said. “Do you stand by that statement?”

“No,” Gow retorted. “We should have said ‘based on a true story.'”

Harrison displayed several ads Gow had received from sex-toy companies. “Do you ever get email messages you never asked for? I believe we call it spam,” Gow responded. “So you would fire someone for junk email?”

The university then trotted out Jerry Bui, a forensic investigator who had raked through Gow’s and Wilson’s work computers. The strongest evidence of misconduct he could find was that the couple had “automatic logins” to a couple of porn sites. Though he couldn’t find any browsing history of the sites, Bui speculated that Gow may have used “incognito mode” while watching porn at work or erased his browser history to cover his tracks.

Gow, in his closing argument, dismissed the trial as a sham. “Tenure is based on the quality of one’s teaching, research, and service,” he told the committee. “This fruitless exercise has nothing to do with that.”

The committee, unswayed, voted unanimously that Gow should be fired. They argued that Gow had used his academic position to promote his porn, because in some videos, during foreplay, he mentioned his “Midwestern location” and “academic career.” They also accused him of exploiting his public ouster as chancellor to boost his profile as a porn star.

But the committee’s decision was only a recommendation. More than two months later, Gow faced a second tribunal, before the board of regents for the state’s university system: 17 executives, attorneys, and public servants and one dairy farmer who gathered in Madison to hear the case. The regents had made their position clear in a brief filed before the hearing. “The survival of a public university is dependent on legislative funding, grant funding, tuition revenue, and donations,” they wrote. “Gow’s behavior, left to continue, could negatively affect all four.”

At his first hearing, Gow had defended himself. Before the regents, he was represented by Mark Leitner, a partner at a top Milwaukee law firm. Leitner argued that the university was committing a textbook violation of free-speech rights. “We don’t need the First Amendment to protect ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,'” he said. “We need the First Amendment precisely when the danger of stifling controversial, unpopular speech is at its highest.”

But what’s the danger of stifling porn? Leitner presented Gow’s videos as part of his broader advocacy of nonmonogamy. “There is no doubt that sexual conduct is a matter of importance to people,” Leitner told the regents. “Simply because Dr. Gow’s views on what promotes a healthy and stable marriage do not comport with the views of the majority of society — that doesn’t matter.”

Trustees are now going to be faced with the problem of explaining why it is that we’re going to tolerate other members of the faculty posting controversial content.
Yale law professor Keith Whittington

Harrison, the university’s counsel, dismissed the point: “Dr. Gow would love to, you know, try to rely on a hypertechnical First Amendment argument to get around his bad conduct.”

“It’s not a hypertechnical argument,” Leitner said. “It goes to the heart of what we’re all about in this state and in this country.”

After Leitner concluded, the regents were given a chance to ask questions. They had none.

Aweek later, the regents met again to decide Gow’s fate. After deliberating in private for half an hour, they cast their votes one by one. Seventeen supported firing Gow. One abstained.

Gow’s 40-year career in academia was over. He also forfeited some $300,000 worth of accrued sick leave and other benefits.

As Gow left the hearing, walking hand in hand with Wilson, a phalanx of photographers snapped pictures as if they were the Bennifer of Wisconsin. Gow pulled out a prepared statement. Calling the regents a “board of hypocrites,” he accused them of breaching the university’s commitment to academic freedom and of caving to pressure from Republican state senators who had called for his dismissal. The regents, Gow said, “are willing to fire me for the short-term goodwill they get with the far right.”

On his two-hour ride home, Gow elaborated on the wider issues he believes are at stake. “There are many faculty who would say: Well, this guy, he’s not one of us,” he told me. “And that’s unfortunate. Because if they can do this to me, they could do it to any tenured professor. Academia is not a law firm or a bank or an insurance company. We’re in the truth business. We are dedicated to the fearless sifting and winnowing of the truth, and that’s what this is supposed to be about.”

Gow’s colleagues apparently didn’t consider his porn videos the kind of expression that tenure is designed to protect: During his fight to remain on the faculty, none of them came to his defense in public. But Keith Whittington, a Yale law professor and founding chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance, sees Gow’s case as setting a dangerous precedent. “University trustees are now going to be faced with the problem of explaining why it is that we’re going to tolerate other members of the faculty posting controversial content,” he says. He puts Gow’s online porn in the same category as “posting inflammatory personal, political opinions on social media.” In the wake of Gow’s dismissal, he says, making such distinctions “is going to be a hard line to maintain.”

But the fight may not be over. Gow plans to file a federal lawsuit against the university, alleging a violation of his First Amendment rights. And in the meantime, he and Wilson plan to keep exercising those rights. Since being outed, they’ve released adult videos like “Top 10 Squirting Orgasms and Cumshots” and “Our Honeymoon with the Porn Stars,” as well as tamer cooking-show fare like “Making Plant-Based Egg Salad.” The videos pull in as much as $3,000 a month on OnlyFans, and the couple is getting requests to create customized content, including foot-fetish videos and gay scenes with Gow. But thrilling as their middle-aged sexual awakening has been, they say, it doesn’t compensate for the loss of Gow’s professorship.

“This is 2024,” Gow says. “We thought we had come a ways in Wisconsin from the McCarthy era. Apparently not.”

Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She’s the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.