Ballroom dancing offers that.'' Across the country, at Yale and Arizona State Universities, at the University of Wisconsin and San Diego State University, partner dancing, both traditional ballroom and swing, is sweeping campuses. Ms. Teague said, ''five years ago there were dozens of schools with hundreds of students doing ballroom dance. Today there are hundreds of schools with thousands and thousands of dancers. These dances provide sensuality and imagination. It is the structured nature of the male-female relationship in ballroom dancing, the courting rituals and prescribed steps that have drawn the attention of analysts.
Etiquette courses, for which no credit is given, are also on the rise on some campuses.
The conventions around dating fell away in recent decades. I have students come in and say they want intimate relations but don't know how to get there. The trend also seems to be a middle-class revenge against the formlessness of popular dance that began in the early 1960's when Chubby Checker's twist sent partner dancing packing. Dancing, for milleniums a form of social glue, deteriorated in the 1960's into group chaos against a background of loud, pulsating rhythms and nervous two-step hugging to slower songs. In the Penn State ballroom dance classes, held in several large gymnasiums with pale green walls, exposed pipes and worn wooden floors, that is precisely what may be observed.