Legal fees are climbing for the Universities of Wisconsin as Joe Gow, the former UW-La Crosse chancellor fired for his secret porn-making side hustle, vows to keep fighting what he claims is the wrongful termination of his faculty tenure. Zach Greenberg, faculty legal defense counsel for free speech legal group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), says Gow’s attorney, Mark Leitner, plans to file a lawsuit against the UW system within the next few weeks. Leitner did not respond to a request for comment.
“We look forward to him holding the university accountable in court,” Greenberg says in an interview. “We’ll be following this case closely.”
The organization recently released an invoice obtained via public records request, which showed that the UW system paid law firm Husch Blackwell $135,098 for legal services to “investigate certain allegations of conduct against Dr. Joe Gow.”
Gow made national headlines in December 2023 after a secret pornography and vegan cooking channel he operated alongside his wife, Carmen Wilson, was detailed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as the Board of Regents debated disciplining or firing a then-unknown UW chancellor. The Regents unanimously voted to fire Gow, already set to retire from his chancellorship in June 2024, and strip him of his faculty tenure in September.
Greenberg says that stripping a faculty member of tenure is “extremely rare” and that many universities have never done it. He says that though Gow profited off his activities, tenured professors have a right to “engage in expression,” whether profitable or not. Though the UW system argued Gow was unfit to teach and caused reputational harm to the system and UW-La Crosse, Greenberg says that to revoke his tenure, the UW system should have had to prove Gow’s conduct impacted his ability to teach.
“Nothing the [UW system] has shown would impact that,” Greenberg says.
In response to a request for comment and to verify the authenticity of FIRE’s records, UW system Director of Media Relations Mark Pitsch emailed a three-year contract between the UW system and law firms Husch Blackwell LLP, Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, and Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP, that calls for payment of a $1.5 million retainer for “legal advice on issues relevant to the UW System.”
