Campus debauchery more red-state than blue-state

The Economist attempts to segue from a indictment of the debauchery at elite colleges to one of their liberal bias:

Tom Wolfe's new novel about a young student, I am Charlotte Simmons, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland—about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to Animal House. In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students 'hook up' (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal...Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad).

This conservative criticism of life at contemporary universities confuses me: how does "hook-up culture" go against the "life of the mind"? Going back several decades, when hooking up was less out in the open and perhaps less pervasive, women would frequently leave college early (the MRS degree) and thus, in the name of securing a monogamous relationship, would leave the academic enviromnent without even getting a diploma. Hooking up may be mindless, but some great minds (Albert Einstein, Allan Bloom, etc.) have found time to both, in modern parlance, get some, and use their brains. I'm not saying conservatives should find hooking up moral, but they should acknowledge that, if anything, it is the result of contemporary students coming to college in order to be employable after (or, at times, in order to learn during), rather than with the specific goal of finding a spouse while on campus.

Furthermore, I just don't see the connection between the fact that today's elite universities are dominated by liberals with the idea that they are places at which "[b]rainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them." These are two entirely separate problems. Is the idea that college today is just plain worse, so debauchery and left politics can be lumped together by the conservative who's generally displeased with the state of things? The sort of debauchery arguably most prevalent, or at least most visible, at many elite colleges--aggressive, athletic boys and their well-kept-up female companions engaging in drunken, heterosexual experimentation--has more of a red-state than blue-state sound to it; if the faculties had their way, college students would squander their four years by challenging traditional gender roles, joining poetry circles and protest movements instead of sports teams, and drinking from wine glasses, not kegs.

Via Arts and Letters Daily.