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

Simone Lueck for BI

Can a tenured professor be fired for making porn? That's the question, perhaps unprecedented in the annals of higher education, that the University of Wisconsin set out to answer last month. On September 27, the system's board of regents sat down to rule on whether Joe Gow, who taught communications at UW-La Crosse, should be stripped of his tenure and dismissed for producing porn videos with his wife, a fellow academic named Carmen Wilson, and uploading them to Pornhub. The productions — with titles like "Juicy Anniversary" and "Vacation Sex" — featured Gow and Wilson having sex in a variety of racy scenarios, often with big-name porn stars.