HOW NOW JOE GOW?

Not yet gone.  "Mr Gow was the chancellor (Wisconsin-speak for campus president) of Oktoberfest destination college Wisconsin-LaCrosse until his unusual side hustle came to light."

Nor forgotten.  "Joe Gow Hangs in Legal Limbo."  And you thought negotiating with Iranians was exhausting?  "While he accepted his firing from the chancellor role, which he was set to retire from in 2024, Gow has argued he should not be fired as a tenured professor for making adult videos on his own time—a position that has been endorsed by First Amendment advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression."

He engages in instructive contemplation about academic cancel culture.

Given the lack of clear parallels in higher education, Gow believes the outcome may set a precedent for faculty free speech rights at a time when many professors have been fired for controversial statements. Gow points to the recent rash of firings over comments about late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, some of which were later reversed as professors sued and won on free speech grounds. With some of those professors returning to the classroom after legal wins, Gow hopes for a similar outcome.

“To be frank, I don’t know that anybody particularly cares what happens to me or my wife, but if you care about freedom of speech for tenured faculty, then you ought to care about this case,” Gow said.

I'd be more sympathetic if the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education offered examples in which faculty, or students, who took on the prevailing ethos in higher education had as full-throated a defense of their free speech rights as the ones who viewed the death of Charlie Kirk as somehow the removal of an existential threat to their way of life.

The former chancellor's side hustle?  It's paradigmatic of contemporary higher education, a nest of neurotics and weirdos, and it might have been sufficient to hold it up for mockery rather than make the man, who is of retirement age anyway, a martyr.