I Made Porn. That Shouldn’t Cost Me Tenure.

When you’ve been a chancellor for 16 years, there’s nothing unusual about suddenly being asked by the system’s legal office to discuss a “personnel situation” on your campus. So when I stood in front of my office computer and entered a virtual meeting a few days before Christmas last year, I wasn’t surprised to see an HR official and a familiar lawyer on my screen. But then they began asking about what my spouse and I had been doing on the internet. I knew this day might come, but I didn’t expect it to arrive so quickly.

You might remember my unusual story: “A Chancellor Is Fired for Porn Videos” began the Chronicle headline. For about a decade, my wife, Carmen Wilson (also an academic), and I had used our vacation time to secretly record a series of sex scenes with adult-industry professionals. We made 18 of them in all, and we also published two books (using pen names) about our experiences. Late last year, after I had announced I was stepping down from my administrative position at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse to focus on my faculty role, we thought it would be interesting to see how a few of our scenes might be received on popular adult websites. We uploaded five of them (featuring just the two of us). Knowing those platforms host millions of videos, we doubted anyone would pay much attention.

How wrong we were.

We watched incredulously as our videos, with no promotion whatsoever, drew hundreds of views per day, then thousands, then tens of thousands. After just a few weeks, we passed a million views in all, leading one site to rank us as its No. 2 creators for North America and Oceania in December 2023.

We never anticipated such an enthusiastic response. A couple of middle-aged academics with average physiques trying to spice up their marriage — not exactly what comes to mind when you think “porn stars.” But because we had made the videos for ourselves, showing the kind of lovemaking and storytelling we wanted to see, viewers — and, apparently, website algorithms — seemed to find them distinctly sincere. Our favorite comment was, “Your scenes are hot, in a wholesome way.” That captured exactly what we were trying to do.

During my surprise virtual meeting, I tried to explain all of that to a lawyer for the University of Wisconsin system and her HR colleague. And after I had calmly confirmed that the books and videos they had been made aware of were indeed mine, they wondered whether I had been paid to create them. Wisconsin law requires public officials to file an annual “Statement of Economic Interests,” and any outside, nonstate income above $1,000 a year must be disclosed. I reassured my questioners that my wife and I hadn’t earned more than $1,000 per year in book royalties, and we had probably spent more than $80,000 of our own money to produce our videos. What we were doing amounted to a very expensive hobby. That seemed to satisfy my system colleagues, and they ended the meeting cordially, giving me no indication of what might happen next.

I stepped back from the screen on my stand-up desk, sat down at a small table in my office, and took a breath. I had a decision to make: Take down the videos and try to save the final few months of my well-paying chancellor job, or keep them up and take a stand for free speech and expression?

This wasn’t the first time I had been involved in a free-speech controversy. Five years earlier, I had caused quite a stir when I arranged for an adult-film actress and sex educator, Nina Hartley, to speak on my campus. Back then, I caved in to pressure from the system’s Board of Regents and president, weakly apologizing and reimbursing Hartley’s speaking fee with $5,000 of my own funds — something I came to regret. With that unpleasant experience firmly in mind, I decided to keep the videos up on the web and wait to see how the system’s leaders would respond.

Because Christmas was only a few days away and Carmen and I were about to travel to visit our families, I didn’t tell her about my surprise virtual meeting. I didn’t want to put a cloud of worry over our holidays, and expected that sooner or later I’d receive a phone call from the system president asking me to speed up my retirement as chancellor for “personal reasons.” At that point I’d let Carmen know what had happened, and we’d have to make a decision together about whether we were willing to keep our videos online and tell everyone our full story.

That’s not how things played out. The phone call never came. Instead, two days after Christmas, the system president, Jay Rothman, sent me an email saying that, upon his recommendation, the Board of Regents had voted unanimously to terminate me from my chancellor position. He also released a media statement calling my actions “abhorrent,” and for good measure the Board of Regents’ president, Karen Walsh, said the board was “alarmed” and “disgusted” by what my wife and I had done. Of course, we didn’t agree with those characterizations, but because I had already announced my plan to step down as chancellor, I made no attempt to contest the decision.

I was deeply troubled, however, when Rothman went on to say he was initiating a process designed to challenge my tenured faculty position, which is in communication studies. He announced he had engaged an outside law firm to conduct a “fulsome investigation” and appointed an interim chancellor who quickly banned me from campus. When I came to collect my personal belongings, I was required to have a university police escort.

After an exhaustive investigation, the outside law firm produced a lengthy report. I am now charged with failing to cooperate fully with the investigation, violating university computer-use policies, and engaging in “unethical and potentially illegal conduct.”

To retain my tenure, I need to defend myself before a faculty tribunal at a hearing to be held in mid-June. I look forward to doing so.

I understand why UW leaders didn’t want me to continue as chancellor, but I am puzzled by their determination to keep me from returning to the classroom. After all, these are the same people who, at a board meeting held just weeks before my firing, energetically affirmed the importance of promoting free speech on our campuses. During that meeting, which also included Republican and Democratic state legislators, everyone took particular pride in the regents’ Commitment to Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression, which protects ideas that “are thought by some or even by most members of the university community (or those outside the community) to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrongheaded.” You’d think that policy would cover the kinds of videos and books my spouse and I had created, but when it comes to defending sexually oriented material, our academic leaders’ “commitment” seems to have vanished.

And would displaying a little backbone in the service of academic freedom take all that much courage?

More than 80 years ago, in its landmark Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors cited “moral turpitude” as grounds for dismissing a tenured faculty member. “The standard,” the AAUP explained, “is behavior that would evoke condemnation by the academic community generally.” I don’t have a moral-turpitude clause in my contract, but even if I did, it would be hard to cite that rule as precedent in my case. Social standards have changed drastically since the 1940s.

We live at a time when sex toys are sold by leading retail chains, pornography is among the most popular content on the internet, and serious discussions about the pros and cons of polyamory and dating apps are held in prestigious national newspapers. Driven in large part by technology, sexual and relational norms are evolving, and if adults want to talk about what’s going on, they should be free to do so — particularly in a university classroom. A world-class system like the University of Wisconsin ought to be in the forefront of those discussions.

Will the system be a leader, or will it succumb to cowardice? We’ll know more once I have my hearing. I hope cooler heads will prevail and the faculty will decline to participate in such old-fashioned persecution.

In the meantime, I enjoy recalling an anecdote my wife told me: When we were headed to Las Vegas a few years ago, one of her co-workers asked what we planned to do there. “Oh,” she told him, “the usual stuff: Sit by the pool, eat nice dinners, make some porn.” He chuckled at her cheeky reply.

If only the Wisconsin regents and system president could lighten up, too. Laugh at us if you want to. Call us strange. But please don’t try to suppress the vital conversations we’re starting.