RALEIGH – Heard enough about the allegations of a rape at a party held by the Duke University lacrosse team?

Feel free to treat this as a rhetorical question. Your answer doesn’t really matter – you’ll hear a lot more about the case whether you relish the prospect or not. Within North Carolina, the story involves a local university and has prompted spirited competition between two print rivals, the Durham Herald-Sun and Raleigh News & Observer, as well as between print as a whole and broadcast outlets armed with video, call-in shows, talking heads, and other tools of the trade.

At the national level, L’Affair Lacrosse has made it to a dubious list of distinction: “news” stories that merit at least a mention virtually every night on tabloid-television shows. As it happens, the story really is news (unlike much of the star-struck babble that fills those half-hour TV slots), inviting serious coverage by national newspapers and magazines such as this recent U.S. News & World Report piece that puts it in the larger context of problems in college athletics.

I’ve avoided commenting on L’Affair Lacrosse itself. I don’t really know what happened that night, which puts me in the same category as just about everyone else (including plenty of folks who nevertheless are do daily “analysis” of the case on national chat shows). My interest has flowed mainly to what the coverage of the story tells us about politics, media miscommunication, and campus life. Here are some reflections:

• In some ways, it’s the O.J. Simpson case all over again. Many people seem magnetically drawn to one pole or the other, due either to racial affinity or personal admiration of athletes, quite independent of evidence. Rather than examine the case in particular, they treat it as a symbol. But underneath, specific individuals are either guilty or not. There is no such thing as racial guilt or racial exoneration. And yet here we are.

• Assume no rape for a moment. That doesn’t make the Duke lacrosse players a bunch of innocent little lambs or paragons of young adulthood, as some of their defenders are trying to make them out to be. As a whole, these kids were poorly supervised, irresponsible louts. Unfortunately, that makes them no different from too many other campus athletes and non-athletes. University education should be about the life of the mind, not the life of the party. You’d be surprised how many people disagree with this statement – they see college as a place to “discover yourself” and “try out new things.” I’d rather students discover the library and try out great works of literature, history, and science.

• While I’m annoyed by the drinking culture on campuses – OK, drinking culture itself – I also think the massive coverage here has warped public perceptions of relative risks and trends. As two UNC-Chapel Hill researchers explained so well in an N&O column, there is no evidence that drinking is a bigger problem among youth today than it has been in the past. In some ways, it appears to have improved a bit in recent years. Let’s find out why and do more of that.

• It’s the cult of athletics, not the cult of drunken athletes, that most worries me. We identify our public and private universities with their sports teams far more than is warranted or healthy. When I tell new acquaintances I graduated from UNC-CH, many feel free to regale me with stories about their great love or hate of Carolina basketball. I simply could not care less. I went to school there. I had nothing to do with the semi-pro sports franchises that also happened to be based there.

When, instead, they ask if I’ve ever seen the university’s famous rare-book collection, that will be a sign of progress. (The answer is yes.)

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.