University Chancellor in the U.S. Terminated: This week, the president of a state university in Wisconsin was fired for putting online pornographic movies of himself and his wife. The University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents voted unanimously to fire president Joe Gow. Gow had been in charge of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse since 2007 and had been its leader the longest, going back to the 1960s.
Gow’s wife, Carmen Wilson, was also fired from her unpaid job as an associate to the chancellor. Gow and Wilson said in an interview on Thursday that they think they were fired because of the videos, which had sex scenes with each other and other people under the name Sexy Happy Couple.
University Chancellor in the U.S. Terminated After Involvement in Explicit Videos with Wife
Both of them said they thought it was wrong for the university to punish them for the videos, saying that it went against their right to free speech. Gow, 63, said that he and his wife, 56, have been making movies together for years but only recently chose to post them on porn websites for everyone to see.
They said that in the tapes, they never talked about the school or their work. The head of the University of Wisconsin System, Jay Rothman, said that Gow had done “significant reputational harm” to the school.
Gow is a permanent professor of communication, and Rothman said that after a paid temporary leave, he would be going back to his job as a professor. Rothman, on the other hand, said he had asked the university to look into Gow’s term and for a law firm to look into the issue.
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They are “not following their own policy on academic freedom and freedom of speech,” Gow said. “They also don’t seem to realize that the First Amendment would be critical in this situation.” If you want to know what the US Supreme Court said about a police officer who was fired for selling a sexual video of himself in 2004, they all agreed.
The court said in City of San Diego v. Roe that the officer’s right under the First Amendment had not been broken. The court said that public workers can talk about things that affect the public, but a pornographic movie did not fit that bill.
Experts say that if Gow went to court, he would probably have an even harder time than the police officer did because courts have often found that public entities have more freedom to fire top officials than regular workers.
