May 11, 1982

AYEAR ago, after 10 months as acting president of Barnard College, Ellen V. Futter was named president of the institution, one of the nation's leading women's colleges. At the age of 32, Miss Futter, a graduate of Barnard and Columbia Law School, is one of the nation's youngest college presidents. Much of her attention during the last academic year was devoted to negotiating the future of the relationship between Barnard and Columbia University, the across-the-street neighbor with which it has long been affiliated. After Barnard and Columbia failed to agree on a formula for coeducation, the university announced that it would admit women undergraduates. In this interview with Gene I. Maeroff, an education writer for The New York Times, Miss Futter reflects on those negotiations and the implications for the future. She was first asked to identify the high points and the low points of the eventful first year of her formal presidency. A. The most interesting thing is that I'm absolutely adoring the job. My sense of the college as being first-rate and a very, very healthy institution remains as it was. We've spent the year beginning to position the college for the 80's, and that's not unusual given that the decade is projected as one that will be hard for higher education. The high point has been that we've been able to make a lot of movement in this direction.

The Digital Equipment Corporation, which is generally considered the leading American computer company after the International Business Machines Corporation, entered the personal computer business yesterday with three new products. The new computers, which will range in price from $3,500 to $5,000 and be available in the fall, are clearly aimed at the office and small-business market, rather than the home market. Analysts said the DEC computers are technically impressive and aggressively priced. The one problem DEC might have is in distribution, because the company has not had much experience selling to offices, the analysts said. The company has concentrated its sales efforts on selling to laboratories, factories and data processing departments, as well as to companies that incorporate DEC computers into other systems.

HOUSTON EVERY few days a U-2 or some other high-altitude reconnaissance plane takes off and climbs to the stratosphere. There, at 65,000 feet, almost twice as high as airliners routinely venture, the air is rarefied and largely unadulterated by terrestrial pollution, either man-made or natural. The plane begins sweeping this ethereal environment for dust. This is no ordinary dust, but cosmic dust falling in from space. It may be a kind of dander off comets or fine grains from asteroids or even, in a sense never imagined by the song writer, a little stardust. Whatever it is, cosmic dust is the object of new, systematic collections by aircraft and investigations by American scientists. For this is the only other indisputably extraterrestrial material, besides moon rocks and meteorites, that scientists have been able to seize for examination in their laboratories. From what they have learned so far scientists believe the cosmic dust is so primitive and pristine that it could be revealing of conditions at the beginning of the solar system.

''Dear Mr. Chairman,'' the letters will begin. Signed by Donald T. Regan, the Secretary of the Treasury, they will tell the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee that Congress - for the third time in 16 months - must again raise the ceiling on the national debt or the Government will be unable to pay its bills. And so will occur a new round in a dialogue between the Treasury and Congress that goes back to 1946, when Congress imposed a ''permanent'' ceiling on the Government's debt of $275 billion. The ceiling now is $1,079.8 billion and the debt, which varies from day to day, exceeds $1,000 billion, or $1 trillion.

ASERIOUS disorder of the immune system that has been known to doctors for less than a year - a disorder that appears to affect primarily male homosexuals - has now afflicted at least 335 people, of whom it has killed 136, officials of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said yesterday. Federal health officials are concerned that tens of thousands more homosexual men may be silently affected and therefore vulnerable to potentially grave ailments. Moreover, this immune-system breakdown, which has been implicated in a rare type of cancer, called Kaposi's sarcoma, and seems to invite in its wake a wide variety of serious infections and other disorders, has developed among some heterosexual women and bisexual and heterosexual men. At a recent Congressional hearing, Dr. Bruce A. Chabner of the National Cancer Institute said that the growing problem was now ''of concern to all Americans.'' The cause of the disorder is unknown. Researchers call it A.I.D., for acquired immunodeficiency disease, or GRID, for gay-related immunodeficiency. It has been reported in 20 states and seven countries. But the overwhelming majority of cases have been in New York City (158), elsewhere in New York State (10), New Jersey (14) and California (71).