There have been lots of threads on CC about the Yale Halloween incident. I strongly object to the term “shrieking girl” because I think it’s very sexist. Also it was not a label ever used by FIRE. And as @hebegebe said, plenty of people were videotaping the incident, including the Yale Daily News, so I don’t see anything creepy about Lukianoff doing the same. People videotape confrontations to create a record that is more objective than individual memory. Here’s Lukianoff’s response in an interview about the taping incident:
I wrote an article for The Washington Post about this experience. And, yes, it was just a complete coincidence that I was on campus. Nicholas and Erika Christakis had invited me to talk to their students in the Silliman dorm way back in July 2015; the incidents in those videos took place in November.
When the confrontation in the courtyard took place, I was staying in the dorms and getting ready to give a lecture at those very dorms about freedom of speech that night. I showed up at what turned out to be the tail end of an apparently hour-long confrontation between Nicholas and a crowd of students. There were many other people videotaping it, including the Yale Daily News, which I believe got the entire incident on tape. But I decided to start recording myself because I wanted to make sure that I documented how Nicholas handled himself. It’s been my experience that particularly fraught culture war situations can devolve into a case of “he said/she said”, so you need documentation. Otherwise people may claim, or even possibly misremember, a narrative that fits their existing conclusions. That’s just a simple way of saying I believed that if I didn’t document the confrontation, Nicholas could find himself fired, and I wanted people to see that he conducted himself patiently and responsibly. I was not confident that other students would share their videos of what happened, so I decided to record it myself.
You can tell I am not very good at videotaping by the fact that I did not know to hold my phone in the right orientation. What’s more is I actually thought I had been taping for a good 10 minutes when I realized I had hit the pause, not the record button. If I had gotten that original footage, it would have given better context to the confrontation and shown that it was not just that one student yelling at Nicholas that he was disgusting and should lose his job.
We posted every video I took completely unedited specifically because we knew that if we didn’t, people would accuse us of selectively editing the tape. Nonetheless, a couple of people on Twitter still tried to make that claim. I had no idea the video was going to blow up as much as it did.
I would like to take the opportunity to once again condemn anybody who directed threats or intimidation at the young woman depicted in that video. Threats are not protected speech, nor should they be. Also I thought it was absolutely the wrong decision by The Daily Caller to reveal that student’s name and information in a subsequent article.
The truth is that if the Yale Daily News were to release its video of the entire incident, as I believe they should, you would see that many students were acting in a similar way towards Nicholas. The story should never be about one student, but about the consequences of even mildly critiquing a campus consensus.
http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/cross-greg-lukianoff-lighting-the-first-amendment-fire-on-campus/7510