There’s probably some tiny percentage of the American population for whom the words “Duke lacrosse” summon up nothing but images of grassy fields, preppy players, cheering crowds, championship seasons and all the other tedious paraphernalia of athletic sentimentalism. For the rest of us, the words remains synonymous with one of the biggest media circuses of the 2000s. In March 2006, two strippers were hired by members of the university’s lacrosse team to perform at the private home of two team captains. By the end of the evening, one of the two African-American women had filed a complaint about the racial insults shouted at them by the predominantly white partygoers as they left and the other would claim that she had been forcibly detained, raped, sodomized and strangled by a group of men in the house’s bathroom.

William D. Cohan’s “The Price of Silence: The Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities” is the definitive account of what happened up to and after Crystal Gail Mangum made her accusation. Its 600-page length might at first seem more appropriate to a presidential biography or a history of one of the world wars, but “The Price of Silence” earns its heft, and unlike most biographies and histories, it rarely loosens its grip on its reader’s attention. Granted, Cohan’s detailed opening section — recounting the scramble by the newly instated Brodhead to retain Duke’s celebrated basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, in the face of a job offer from the Los Angeles Lakers in 2004 — initially feels extraneous. But soon the reasons for Cohan’s commitment to exhaustively presenting the context of the Duke lacrosse case become evident: This scandal, even more so than most scandals, was one that triggered everybody’s prejudgments. Mangum’s accusation was a virus that landed in the most hospitable petri dish imaginable, a culture rife with unresolved racial, sexual and class tensions and grievances.

Cohan’s “Coach K” preamble is meant to underline something that Brodhead learned during his first days in office: That at Duke, the tail of athletics wagged the dog of the university itself. According to Cohan, Krzyzewski was in effect the most powerful person in the institution, and it was beholden on Brodhead, his technical boss, to do anything to keep him, including building his team a new practice facility and providing a supremely compliant athletic director. Krzyzewski doesn’t figure much in the lacrosse scandal, but to understand why so many people at Duke and in the surrounding community of Durham, N.C., were so eager to believe the worst of the lacrosse players, it’s essential to grasp that within the small universe of Duke, athletes were pashas. Not only did they get away with repeated incidents of drunk and disorderly behavior, but they so dominated the university’s social life that, as one Durham journalist memorably put it, parents were shelling out “close to a quarter of million dollars, no bargain, for a jock-dominated sex zoo where Junior can play Hugh Hefner to a hutchful of willing bunnies with high SATs.”

As the book’s subtitle would have it, this is a story of how lucrative and well-connected sports programs “corrupt” universities like Duke. Perhaps ultimately Durham’s festering atmosphere of resented, abusive privilege is to blame. But the impression left by “The Price of Silence” is that the true drivers of the scandal were an overzealous Durham police officer, Mark Gottlieb, and, above all, the misconduct of Durham’s district attorney, Mike Nifong. What Cohan characterizes as Gottlieb’s “crusade against the Duke students in [Durham neighborhood] Trinity Park” — overzealous, perhaps, but the long-suffering residents of Trinity Park, with their urine-poisoned lawns and sleepless weekend nights, were not complaining — was in full swing by March 2006. For his part, as a white man, Nifong faced a tricky primary reelection campaign against two Democratic rivals, a black man and a white woman.

If not for the individual circumstances and predispositions of these two men, it seems likely that Mangum’s accusation would have been written off as too muddled and precarious to merit pursuing. Under the influence of a substance of some kind — the players insisted that Mangum arrived at the party impaired and she would eventually suggest that she was given a drugged cocktail after she arrived — she had passed out and had to be carried to the other dancer’s car when they left. The dancer, Kim Roberts, called the police because she did not know where Mangum lived. Cohan proposes that Mangum reported being raped in order to distract authorities from the fact that she’d been found intoxicated and had left her two young children home alone. Mangum’s initial statements varied wildly, with the number of men who assaulted her ranging from two to 20 and the number of fellow dancers ranging from one to three. Mangum, it would emerge, had a history of mental disturbance and run-ins with the law. She once stole a taxi cab and fled sheriff’s department pursuit by driving 70 miles per hour at night without headlights on a 55 mph highway, much of it on the wrong side of the road, then laughing as she tried to run over a sheriff’s deputy.