On December 9, in the small hours of the morning, a drunk Columbia undergraduate student named Julian von Abele was filmed outside the campus’s main library delivering a passionate ode to whiteness. “White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world,” von Abele declared to a group of students, many of whom were not white. “We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because, ‘Oh my God we’re so bad.’” In an ill-fated attempt to pacify the collection of students surrounding him, he added the caveat, “I don’t hate other people, I just love white men.”

Students and administrators reacted to the incident with unanimous condemnation. Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school, banned von Abele from campus. Many argued that von Abele’s tirade should be understood not as an isolated event, but as a symptom of the university’s ongoing complicity in white supremacy—a systemic problem calling for a systemic solution. Columbia’s Black Student Organization led the charge with a list of demands including extra time for affected students to complete their final exams; increased funding for minority faculty recruitment, on which the university has already spent $185 million since 2005 to little apparent effect; and an unfortunately phrased call for “the incorporation of scientific racism into the Frontiers of Science syllabus.” (Surely they meant the incorporation of information about scientific racism.)

But an isolated event doesn’t indicate a systemic problem. Like so many things nowadays, extrapolating from a single event to a crisis is only wrong when your opponents do it. Just a few months ago, many commentators on the Right extrapolated a supposed crisis of illegal immigrant crime from the murder of a single American by an illegal immigrant. At the time, progressives recognized this for the irrational fear-mongering that it was. Yet it is the same flawed logic that extrapolates an alleged crisis of campus racism from a single racist incident.