What was going on when I was born?

The United States Commission on Civil Rights says in a new report that two years of fiscal austerity and staff reductions have seriously eroded the enforcement of civil rights by the Federal Government. The report asserted that there had been a noticeable decline in enforcement at six agencies, the Departments of Justice, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.. In some areas, such as housing, it said, compliance reviews and investigations have declined to the point that ''they have become virtually negligible.'' The report is the latest in a series from the commission that has repeatedly criticized the civil rights policies of the Reagan Administration. White House officials contend that such criticism is politically motivated, but commission members deny it. President Reagan is trying to replace three of the six commission members, but the Senate has yet to confirm his nominees.

THE worker struggles valiantly to haul the corpse of another bee out of the hive. She pauses at the entrance platform before flying away with the lifeless body in her grasp. Far from her abode, she drops the carcass in a field, then flies back home and searches for more bodies. She is a honeybee undertaker, one of a small group in the colony whose task is to remove bee cadavers from the hive. Scientists believe that she may refuse to do the jobs of others, and that they may refuse to do hers. The discovery by a Cornell University researcher that a certain corps of bees acts as undertakers is one of several recent findings of previously unknown divisions of labor that enable the bee community to function efficiently.

An Al Hirschfeld drawing yesterday, accompanying a review of the artist's show at Harvard University, lacked a credit line. It was from the Margo Feiden Galleries in New York.

A United Nations dispatch Friday on the reunification of Cyprus incorrectly described the position of President Spyros Kyprianou on a request for a meeting with Turkish Cypriot leaders.

The Executive Changes column in Business Day on Thursday incorrectly described the new position of Paul E. Huber at United Telecommunications Inc. He will be president and chief executive officer of the Megatek Corporation, a subsidiary.

The commission that President Ferdinand E. Marcos appointed to investigate the assassination of Benigno S. Aquino Jr. resigned today. A letter to the President signed by four retired Supreme Court justices on the commission said they were resigning in response to widespread doubts about their impartiality. An entirely new commission, the letter said, would have better public standing if it included ''members acceptable to all sectors of society.'' A few hours before this afternoon's announcement, a Member of Parliament whom President Marcos named as the commission's second chairman issued a statement saying he would not accept the post.

Markets Stock prices surged to another closing record. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 12.50 points, to 1,284.65, and two other market indicators, the New York Stock Exchange composite index of 1,500 shares and Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, also reached records. In the past five sessions, the Dow has soared more than 53 points as investors responded to new economic signs. On the Big Board, turnover was reduced because of the Columbus Day holiday, falling to 67.1 million shares. (Page D1.) The dollar gained against most other major currencies. Gold prices rose $2.90 an ounce in New York, to $403.20. (D18.)

The Young World clothing store that Stanley I. Chera's family owns on Fulton Street in Brooklyn was billed $140,311 in property taxes last year, but Mr. Chera says he willingly paid $10,900 more. What the additional money bought was improved sanitation, security and other services - services provided not by New York City but by the Fulton Mall special assessment district that local property owners and merchants established to tax themselves. Three other such districts are operating in Queens and Manhattan. Forty- one similar districts, including one to revitalize Herald Square, have been created, on paper at least. Some of the new business improvement districts, as they are now called, have become bogged down in confusing state legislation. And the city law under which they were created has expired, a victim of a political dispute between the Koch administration and the City Council. At least a dozen proposed districts missed the June 30 deadline.

The Government stepped up its war of words against North Korea today, blaming it for the ''barbarous'' bombing in Burma Sunday that killed 19 people, including some of South Korea's highest-ranking officials. President Chun Doo Hwan, who apparently escaped harm only because a traffic delay kept him from the scene of the explosion, said upon his return to Seoul this morning that the incident was a ''carefully premeditated plot against the life of your President.'' 'Not Talking From Evidence' However, Government officials acknowledged they had no evidence that North Korea was behind the bombing, in which 47 people were wounded, many of them seriously. A principal Government spokesman, Choi Tae Soon, said, ''We are not talking from evidence but from the past record of the North Korean conspiracy.''

At one time, business was so slow that the owners of Charivari, the high-fashion Manhattan boutique chain, chopped the bottoms off a line of $45 jeans in the hope they would sell better as shorts. On another occasion, Jon Weiser, the 32-year-old son of the company's founder, was kicked out of a European showroom when the French designer Christian Aujard discovered that Charivari was on the West Side and assumed it was a discount house. ''The West Side had a stigma back then,'' said Mr. Weiser, president of Charivari Menswear. ''So we worked that much harder to overcome it.''

Dr. Barbara McClintock, an 81-year- old scientist from Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., won the 1983 Nobel Prize for medicine yesterday for her discovery that genes can move from one spot to another on the chromosomes of a plant and change the future generations of plants it produces. She was cited for work she had done on corn four decades ago, work that scientists once regarded as heretical. Only in the last decade have researchers begun to realize the importance of that work and to extend its insights into diseases of humans and animals. Dr. McClintock's award was unusual not only in that it came so long after the research it celebrated, but in other respects as well. She was the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, as the category is officially known, and only the third woman to win the award in that category. And she was only the third woman to win an unshared Nobel science prize. The first was Marie Curie in 1911 and the second Dorothy C. Hodgkin in 1964, both for chemistry.

At the first meeting this fall of the international-relations course she teaches to juniors and seniors at Hunter College High School, Anna Morello overheard a conversation as the students were filing into the room. ''Wow, this is going to be a great class, look who's in here,'' one young man said to another. It was not an atypical comment at a high school at which the students often welcome the intellectual stimulation that they provide one another, a place where students grow keenly aware of what to expect of their peers. Housed in a fortresslike building at 94th Street and Park Avenue and built to blend in with the remaining wall of an armory that stood on the site, the high school and a companion elementary school on the first floor are the laboratory schools of Hunter College. They are schools for the gifted, admitting students by special examination.