Sex and Work among Contemporary Higher Education Administrators
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Like the case of the Virginia candidate who was discovered to also be a sex worker, I really don’t care what people do sexually. I mean this in the most literal way–I don’t want to talk about it much either way and my interest in your sexuality is literally zero. Do whatever you want, I really don’t care, but also I don’t need to hear about it all the time. Keep that shit to yourself. However, if you are going to be a public figure, obviously this is going to go public too and you have to be prepared for that and fine with whatever happens. The outrage that some expressed about the candidate having to go through this was bizarre to me–what did you think was going to happen here?
UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow, who was denied a pay raise five years ago over inviting a former porn actress to speak on campus, has been fired for himself engaging in explicit sexual acts with his wife on popular porn websites.
Gow, the longest-tenured chancellor in the Universities of Wisconsin system, was already planning to retire at the end of the school year. But in a three-hour, closed-door meeting Wednesday, the Board of Regents unanimously decided to terminate his chancellorship and place him on administrative leave.
It’s unclear whether Gow violated any specific UW system policies. Current policies allow the system president and the Regents to fire a chancellor at any time, when “such action is deemed to be in the best interests of the chancellor’s institution and of the UW System.”
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Gow said Wednesday night he was not invited to the closed-session meeting and has concerns about his rights to due process. He also highlighted what he said was the hypocrisy of the UW system preaching the importance of free speech at board meetings just weeks before firing him.
“I want to stress that the most important thing is that my wife and I are grateful that we live in a country where we have a First Amendment freedom to create and publish books and videos that explore consensual adult sexuality,” Gow said. “I’m very concerned that here’s an issue of free speech, and we’re seeing the Board of Regents not supporting the concept.”
Gow said Wednesday night he was not invited to the closed-session meeting and has concerns about his rights to due process. He also highlighted what he said was the hypocrisy of the UW system preaching the importance of free speech at board meetings just weeks before firing him.
“I want to stress that the most important thing is that my wife and I are grateful that we live in a country where we have a First Amendment freedom to create and publish books and videos that explore consensual adult sexuality,” Gow said. “I’m very concerned that here’s an issue of free speech, and we’re seeing the Board of Regents not supporting the concept.”
The profile goes on to say the couple has videos on accounts on popular porn websites, including PornHub and OnlyFans. An account on X, formerly known as Twitter, openly identifies them as “Joe” and “Carmen” as the two invite porn actors onto their personal show to cook with them while clothed and later engage in sexual acts reserved for the subscriber-based porn sites. The pair also posts their cooking show and conversations with the actors — including Hartley in one installment — on their YouTube account, “Sexy Healthy Cooking.”
First, I cannot believe–in fact I will not believe–that this was not an open secret among plenty of people in power in that state for years before this. There is too much porn in the world and there are too many people who watch a lot of it for absolutely no one to know that this powerful person was not a fairly well known porn actor, not to mention the fact that he was inviting his porn friends to campus for talks!
Second, good for Gow for inviting those porn friends to campus! I bet that in fact that was a very interesting discussion of speech and sexuality and work in modern America.
Third, obviously once this story did come out, there was no way Gow was not going under the bus. Is it appropriate that the head of a small university in a prestigious state system to be a sex worker on the side? I dunno, but I’m hardly outraged or shocked that a lot of parents would say no. I don’t blame them for that, not really. Students come from all sorts of backgrounds and so do their parents and having someone leading the campus who is engaged in work that many see as outright immoral is….problematic, just from the position of running the university.
Fourth, I guess what I am interested in here, other than just talking about this odd case, is the ways that higher education administrators have completely devalued all sorts of work that doesn’t directly serve the momentary desires of capitalists, i.e., employers, i.e., “job creators,” i.e., our modern gods who must be obeyed at all costs. Obviously, the head of the LaCrosse campus has only so much power over the system. This is not the head of Madison. And a long-tenured chancellor means he has dealt with Robin Vos and Scott Walker. So this is not completely in his control. Moreover, I can’t find out anything quickly about Gow’s specific complicity in the decline of higher education in Wisconsin. But knowing people at other branch campuses of that system, it’s been a terrible time there to be a historian, philosopher, lit professor, language professor, etc. I guess in my worldview, one would hope that an administrator who embraced his own alternative world as a sex worker would recognize other forms of non-STEM work as also valuable, but there’s little evidence anyone rises in academic administration today with such crazy values. Better off being a sex worker on the side than supporting more faculty hires in history.