What was going on when I was born?

An old Navy man as well as a veteran of negotiations to free the 52 Americans in Iran, Deputy Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher voiced hope last week that ''this tragic event (which) happened on our watch'' could be brought ''to a successful conclusion on our watch.'' With only 16 days to go before the change of command, Carter Administration officials admitted that the chance of timely resolution was slim. But a narrowing of differences was perceptible through the mist of ambiguity and animosity that has characterized Teheran's responses to Administration proposals.

NUNS AND SOLDIERS By Iris Murdoch. 505 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $14.95. IRIS MURDOCH'S new novel, ''Nuns and Soldiers,'' is an epitome and sum of its 19 predecessors. It provides us, therefore, with an opportunity to formulate some constants among this round score of fictions and to see what they add up to. The first of her novels, ''Under the Net'' (1954), won her immediate acclaim as one of the Angry Young Men - a confusion of sexes that anticipates a number of her characters. Since then, critics, as usual, have disagreed about what is good and what bad in her work. But they have agreed above all else to take Iris Murdoch seriously, to take her as among ''the most accomplished British novelists to come to maturity since the close of World War II,'' to quote one of her critics.

''Of all the Washington acronyms, OSHA is the worst four-letter swear word in small business's vocabulary.'' - Mike McKevitt, director of Federal legislation for the National Federation of Independent Business. ''No thoughtful academic would deny that we could achieve our present environmental objectives at half the price.''- Bruce A. Ackerman, professor of law at Yale University, describing the E.P.A. By EDWIN McDOWELL T HE Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, designed to make the workplace and the environment better places in which to live, have just turned 10. But any celebration will be short-lived if the business community and a growing number of academic critics have their way in the incoming Reagan administration, whose officials and theoreticians are themselves highly critical of both agencies as not only unnecessarily costly but as conceptually flawed as well. Indeed, there is every indication that 1981 will mark a major turning point for both OSHA and the E.P.A., which if they survive the plans Congress apparently has in store for them may do so in greatly altered form.

Citicorp has bought land and commissioned plans for a new office tower on 53d Street and Lexington Avenue, just south of the Citicorp Center, which it built four years ago, and cater-corner to the rear of the bank's headquarters at 399 Park Avenue. The proposals for a building in the city's most active area of new construction comes at a time when office rents in Manhattan are at a record high and the city is re-examining its midtown zoning. Citicorp has commissioned three architectural firms to develop plans for the building, which it would only partly occupy itself. The building would have a million square feet of office space, about the same amount as the slant-roofed Citicorp Center.

Jane Ann Cohen, a former account coordinator with Ted Bates & Company, used to walk past 1166 Avenue of the Americas on her way to work from her East Side apartment. But when the streets were wet or icy, she changed her route to avoid that sidewalk. "I find it slick and if there's ice, forget it - it just doesn't grip," she said. Israel Iveson, a 75-year old part-time messenger, walked in front of 1 Times Square while on the job last winter. It had snowed that morning and the terazzo sidewalk was icy and slippery. Mr. Iveson fell and fractured his hip. His lawyer has filed a claim against the city for a million dollars, charging that Mr. Iveson was disabled for life. In a pending case, Mohamed Ahmed, an accounting clerk, seeks $2 million in damages for injuries that he says resulted from a fall in 1974, when he was 52, on a terrazzo sidewalk outside 522 Fifth Avenue on a rainy day. Mr. Ahmed says he was permanently disabled, with a loss of sight in one eye and the use of an arm seriously impaired. Both the property owner - then the First National City Bank - and the city were sued for $2 million on the claim that terrazzo is dangerous when wet and needs to be covered, at the very least, by a rubber mat. According to lawyers in negligence suits, such cases are on the rise as a result of the wider use of a variety of materials for sidewalks to obtain a more esthetic effect than concrete provides.

The likely appointee is in his 50's and a senior executive at a major company.

CLINGING to the outline of a sunken ship 30 miles off the coast of Long Beach Island, several inches of black sludge have smothered the last signs of marine life where abundant algae and blue mussels once grew as forage for larger species. A few miles from the public beaches at Sandy Hook, the shells of lobsters and the delicate fins of flounder are erroding or rotting, and mutant bacteria and viruses thrive within bottom sediments that are laden with toxic chemicals. Commercial fishermen say there just are not as many species of fish or the quantities of fish as there used to be off the New Jersey coast. The effects of ocean dumping do not catch the eye of the Sunday bather, the casual sports fisherman or the oceanfront resident. Recent interviews with professional scuba divers and those who otherwise make their living from the Atlantic brought out the conditions that exist beneath the surface.

THE vigilance of teachers' unions, protective state laws and changing views on what constitutes immorality and its effect on teaching ability are making the discharge of incompetent teachers increasingly difficult, according to school officials across the country.But after losing hundreds of cases on technicalities each year in attempts to dismiss alleged incompetents, schools are beginning to watch teachers more carefully, seeking better and more objective ways to judge teaching ability. And as a result more charges are being brought by school systems long frustrated by their inability to rid themselves of unqualified teachers. Records in state courts are filled with cases where school boards did not back up their charges carefully enough. For example, Arnold Agnos, an English teacher in Niles, Ill., was dismissed for incompetence. Students said he gave tests that he never graded and returned, failed them without sending notices, and called them names -such as ''knuckleheads'' and ''ring-a-lings.'' Once, when a student asked a question, he allegedly simply stared blankly at her; he was said to have told another she should see a psychologist when she said that a story the class read was ''too gory.'' The teacher wanted his job back, and he did.. A state hearing officer said the school board's evidence was trivial and insignificant. A judge later upheld the decision.

HARTFORD CHANGES that were set in motion in last fall's election campaigns and accelerated by Governor Grasso's resignation have brought increased prominence to three politicians who share a small-town background and are widely perceived as more conservative in their approach to government policies than some of the elected officials whom they replaced. Two important urban liberals have also moved farther from the center of the political process. Joseph J. Fauliso of Hartford has moved up from being President Pro Tempore of the State Senate to Lieutenant Governor, a position that, ironically, carries greater prestige but usually less influence on policy. He may retain some political clout, but he loses his Senate vote.

WASHINGTON JUST two and a half years ago, in what was his first race for Congress, he won the Republican primary by only 134 votes before upsetting the Democratic incumbent, Helen S. Meyner, in the general election with 52 percent of the vote. Two months ago, Representative James A. Courter of Hackettstown topped his earlier performance, winning re-election with 72 percent of the vote. Then in the waning days of 1980, Mr. Courter's Republican colleagues in the House provided him with still another victory by electing him president of the ''Republican Sophomore Class'' - that is, leader of the 37 Republican Representatives first elected in 1978. As he prepared to join the small group of Republican leaders who will confer with the Democratic majority in the House on Presidentelect Ronald Reagan's legislative program, Mr. Courter said: ''I look forward to getting a lot accomplished in the 97th Congress through an attitude of constructive cooperation with the Democratic majority.''

LONG BEACH ''IF I had one million dollars to spend in Long Beach, I would fix up all the broken-down buildings,'' wrote Michael Ward, an 11-yearold sixth grader in an essay he sent to City Hall, where planners are spending more than $8 million in Federal funds to rebuild the boardwalk, construct two new neighborhood centers and revitalize the downtown area, among other projects. As it turns out, the city planners and the sixth graders from the Lindell School shared some of the same ideas. The students wrote their essays after a recent bus tour of the city, guided by Harvey Weisenberg, the President of the City Council. Michael also wrote that he would ''fix up all the streets with potholes and bumps, and cover it all over in blacktop.'' His classmate, Eddie Dieringer, wrote: ''If I'm lucky, I'll have $500 left and I'd organize a bunch of kids to go around L.B. with litter bags and pick up garbage for a small salary.''

HIGH school guidance counselors, teachers and family relations experts on the Island report that they are seeing appreciable changes today in the career aspirations of young people, who are increasingly viewing their education and careers along nonsexist lines. With sexual stereotyping breaking down, priorities for this generation's students appear to revolve around a perception that they are free to be whatever they want. The findings of educators here - that young women are demanding to be treated as individuals, for their skills, not for their sex, and that young men are turning away from some of the chauvinistic attitudes of their fathers - reflect a nationwide trend. Among the factors cited for the widespread change, which academics believe cuts across socio-economic lines, are the continuing inflationary spiral in the economy, making work mandatory for both parents in many middle-income families; the impact of the women's movement, the rising divorce rate and the visibly changing role of working women in the last decade. According to Sadie Hofstein, the director of the Mental Health Association of Nassau County, there has been a drastic change in the attitudes of young people, which she believes has come about in the last 10 years, when both sexes began to seek ''lifetime work'' as a natural part of their identities. She credits two factors as being responsible for this phenomenon.