What was going on when I was born?

THERE are moments when Prof. Richard Norgaard thinks that he is back in the Big 10, where sports loom large in campus life. ''That's odd because when I joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut I realized that the atmosphere wasn't at all like it was in the Midwest when I was at Minnesota or, for that matter, when I was at Southern California or Texas,'' he said the other day. ''Everything was very loose here.'' But that was 10 years ago, and, while Connecticut traditionally was fielding fairly strong basketball teams, there was a general feeling of ennui on the part of students toward the university's athletic teams. ''Now, though, it's a lot different around here because of the basketball team,'' said Dr. Norgaard, a professor of finance. ''It's all much more exciting and the campus is a far more livable place.''

WASHINGTON THE advice to Ronald Reagan from Jimmy Carter was roughly put for the man who had counseled calmness and restraint during the long months of tortuous negotiations to free the 52 American hostages in Iran. Abide by the agreement, he said, ''but never do any favors for the hoodlums who persecuted innocent American heroes.'' That caught the political mood of the moment and immediately sharpened the policy dilemmas for the new Administration. Even stronger passions swept through Congress with the revelation of fake firing squads, months of solitary confinement, Russian roulette games, strippings, beatings and other mistreatment of the hostages during their 444-day ordeal. Some politicians talked of punishing Iran or revoking the hostage agreement.

CHICAGO C HRYSLER'S production workers, now in the process of voting on a package of $622 million in pay cuts, face an excruciating decision in determining whether to ''give back'' wages and benefits negotiated in previous contracts. But they need not feel alone in their agony. In the last year sluggish demand in the economy along with persistent inflation and vanishing profits have led several beleaguered companies in declining industries to demand cost savings concessions from their employees. In recent months, such companies as Armour, Conrail and Firestone, in addition to Chrysler and Uniroyal have won substantive changes in previously negotiated wages or work rules. International Harvester took a bitter and costly six-month strike last year to change its work rules and reduce its labor costs.

Donna Piser was a wisp of a woman, 4 feet, 11 inches tall and 100 pounds, with delicate features and size-four feet. At the age of 20, her mother says, she was just becoming pretty. Less than six months after she left her family on Long Island and joined the great middle-class migration to Houston, her life had begun to flower, and the future seemed full of promise and love. Bobby Joe Clarke was a tough, rangy, 18-year-old boilermaker's helper with winning ways, a sly wit and quick fists, qualities that served him well on the rough-and-ready blue-collar side of Houston. But he was adrift, searching for emotional solace that would not come. Calvin McNeil and Craig Taylor were 21-year-old dwellers in the black neighborhoods of Houston's North Side. Both looked younger than their years. Both were free-spirited and ''free-hearted,'' as an acquaintance put it. One liked to play basketball and hang around the park. The other held a steady job and liked to go home to play with his two preschool sons while his wife and mother-in-law played dominoes. At the same time, both men sometimes frequented an often dangerous night world where drug traffic and violent behavior are facts of life.

The RCA Corporation announced last night that Edgar H. Griffiths, its chairman and chief executive officer, would resign on July 1 and that he would be succeeded by Thornton F. Bradshaw, president of the Atlantic Richfield Company and a member of RCA's board of directors. Mr. Griffiths, who is 59 years old, joined RCA in 1948, starting out in the credit department of the RCA Service Company, an RCA subsidiary. He rose to become president of the parent corporation in 1976 and then chairman last year, one of the stormiest years in RCA's recent history. As chairman, Mr. Griffiths had a reputation as a blunt and highly successful financial executive who demanded that things be done his way.

STAMFORD IS there coal in Connecticut's future? ''There are the coal dealers who are advocating that we use coal in the abundance that Mother Nature created it, and environmental groups who say that coal should not be used at all,'' said Leonard Bruckman, director of the division of air compliance in the State Department of Environmental Protection. ''Hopefully, there is a middle ground that we can achieve,'' the official said. In pursuing what it regards as a middle course between the extreme views of industry and environmentalists, the evironmental-protection department is preparing to recommend that a key pollution control standard be eased. A change in the standard, governing sulfur content, would appear open the way to a substantial amount of industrial coal burning. At the same time, at least one major utility is planning to switch from oil to coal for some of its needs. And while government agencies are feeling increased pressure from coal companies and utilities to reduce some of the pollution control laws, many homeowners are seeking to reduce their own energy costs by installing variations of the pot-bellied stoves that heated homes in this country for generations.

RIGHT in the heart of the downtown area, amid the begrimed factories and apartment buildings that are typical of this aging city of 150,000, stands a new municipal health center with 125 employees. The center, which cost $2 million to build three years ago, is as impressive inside as it is outside, with extensively furnished laboratories and hanging plants thriving in white, airy rooms. But what is perhaps most impressive about it cannot be seen. It is the center's aggressive approach to reaching the residents of a city where so many are ignorant about preventive-health care, or are unable to afford it. ''I'll go everywhere and anywhere - on request or when I invite myself,'' said Margaret Park-DuBow, the center's health educator. In an effort to find high-risk and hard-to-reach people, and then encouraging them to be screened for, say, high blood pressure or cervical cancer, Mrs. Park-DuBow and her usual staff of three nurses travel by van or foot. Among them, they speak Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and French, as well as English.

DESPITE recent predictions by major industrial and Government figures of a reduction in Federal funds for science research, optimism is still being voiced about the future of high technology on the Island. The gloomy picture was painted at a Brookhaven National Laboratory symposium by W. Bowman Cutter, executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Jimmy Carter. His judgment was supported by Dr. Edward E. David Jr., president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company. Dr. David was also science adviser to former President Richard M. Nixon and a member of two of President Reagan's transition teams concerning science and technology. Because of the ailing economy and the public cry for cuts in Federal spending, Mr. Cutter said, discretionary subsidies will suffer. And since research and development fall within the 10 percent of the Federal budget that is discretionary, he pointed out, those programs, which are important to the Island's technologically oriented companies, will be severely strained.

Notre Dame beat Maryland on the boards, at the foul line, on defense and, most importantly, by a final score of 73-70 today at Cole Field House. Coach Lefty Driesell of Maryland hung his head and said: ''You should never lose on your home court. This is a disgrace. I told the team I knew we were better than this and we should never again lose at Cole Field House.''

Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong, received a suspended death sentence today from a special court that found her and nine other former Chinese leaders guilty of counterrevolutionary crimes during the Cultural Revolution from 1966-76. The sentence was suspended for two years during which, according to China's criminal code, the 67-year-old former Shanghai actress will be ''helped to reform through labor.'' If she shows repentance after that period, the court can change the sentence to life imprisonment. If she remains defiant, the court can order her execution.

IT was the hostage's week. But it was also Ronald Reagan's, and so most of all it was unabashedly American, a seven-day glide proclaiming an end to the age of limits and reasserting the will to succeed. ''After all,'' declared the newly inaugurated President, ''we are Americans,'' and therefore, ''We have every right to dream heroic dreams.'' Republicans, denied for over a decade, exercised their right to celebrate to the fullest. From the first fireworks and laser-beam show Saturday evening to the last corporate couple and sable-stoled movie star leaving the last ball Wednesday morning, pictures of the exhibition were televised around the country; shots of limousines four deep at the capital's curbs and white-collar workers elbow to elbow on the sidewalks were sandwiched between commentary crammed with statistics provided by an exuberant Inaugural Committee.

Millions of Polish workers heeded Solidarity's call today and took a ''free Saturday'' to back the independent union's demands for a five-day workweek. Precise figures on the number of workers who stayed off the job were not available, and probably never will be, but it appeared that the boycott, which had been urged in a dramatic and personal appeal last night by Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, was even more widely observed than a similar protest Jan. 10. ''This free Saturday passed much more effectively than the last one,'' said a Solidarity spokesman in Gdansk. ''Had Walesa's appeal reached more people, it would have been better. Our operation was a success.''