WHEN my kids, two daughters, returned home on summer break following their first year at college, we didn’t bother to try to impose a nighttime curfew. That would have been too sudden a reversal of newly granted (gifted?) independence.

But we tried to impress upon them a common sense formula:

After a certain hour, the likelihood of something good happening diminishes. Between midnight and 1 a.m., bad begins to make its move. At 2 a.m., bad takes the lead. After 2 a.m., it’s bad, by 20 lengths.

In other words, certain situations can be preemptively and logically weighed as to whether they hold the promise of a good or bad result.

And that brings us to Durham, N.C., home of Duke University.

Durham has a lot in common with lots of places. It’s a town in which public figures seem disinclined to do the simple math – two plus two is left unsolved – because the application of common sense might be condemned as socially and even politically insensitive, thus unacceptable.

In Durham, over the last five weeks, common sense seems to have been abandoned in favor of a search for the “underlying reasons” for the alleged rape and/or sexual assault of a female African-American stripper by at least two members of Duke’s mostly white lacrosse team.

The three underlying reasons have been identified as:

1) Race, as in white-on-black sexual assault.

2) Privilege, as in the sense of entitlement within a group largely comprised of sons of socially advantaged parents vs. the daughter of a socially disadvantaged family and race.

3) Class, as in the two classes in Durham – the haves, represented by Duke’s lacrosse team of out-of-towners – and the have-nots, represented by the 27-year-old stripper, a Durham resident and single mother of two.

Heavy stuff. Serious stuff. But it’s all guesswork. And, in some instances, no doubt, it’s the guesswork of wishful thinkers in service to their personal and political obligations, if not their beliefs.

While we don’t know what went on at that team party, the night of March 13, we do know, based on universal truths (and common sense) that before race, privilege and class even entered the equation – before that party even began – nothing good could happen.

Take one large part booze, one large part sex. Blend. Repeat. It’s a recipe for serious trouble everywhere, and no one group holds an exclusive on it. It’s trouble: No guesswork involved, none needed.

The party was predicated on charging the night with alcohol and sex, thus with incivility. Two strippers who, by design and definition, were hired to remove their clothing as a means of entertaining an audience of males that, by design and definition, would be inebriated.

Nothing better than bad could happen. It’s not a mere coincidence that strippers normally don’t perform at libraries, museums and churches, nor is it a coincidence that groups of drunken males are more inclined toward criminal behavior than groups of sober men.

But as the media began to latch on to this story, among the first things they did was ignore the indisputably obvious in favor of “deeper social meanings” – those “underlying reasons,” including white oppression.

When I was in college, three drunken frat brothers took turns taking sexual advantage of a drunken young woman. She was a resident of the largely poor college town, as was the alleged victim of the sexual assault at Duke.

But she was about 19, not 27. And she lived in a nice, big house. And she was white, as were the three frat brothers. But two of those frat brothers who lined up to have sex with her were dirt-poor sons of dirt-poor coal miners.

Booze and sex were the only issues at issue.

We don’t doubt that Durham has racial, social and economic class problems. But to present the March 13 episode as representative of all of them seems like sophistry, the work of political magicians, hustlers.

And that brings up one last question: If we were to throw a men-only party with lots of booze and female strippers, what would be the perfect racial, economic and social make-up of both the party-goers and the strippers in order to ensure that a good time will be had by all?