December 19, 1982

The Islanders, for all their gallant effort to win a second consecutive game for the first time since October, came up with only a 4-4 tie in a hard-fought game tonight with the Philadelphia Flyers in Nassau Coliseum. For a while, the Islanders appeared to have snatched victory from defeat by rallying from a 3-1 deficit on three straight goals in the third period. But the Flyers came right back for the tie on Bobby Clarke's goal at 14 minutes 22 seconds. Al Arbour, the Islander coach, accepted the tie by saying: ''It's been a long time since we've been down, 3-1, and the guys put their heads down and said, 'Not again.' ''

CHICAGO THE night of Oct. 30, the night the Bulls played their home opener against Washington, was particularly cold in Chicago. And the 60 or so women who gathered outside Chicago Stadium with picket signs wore, as one of them would recall, ''a lot of layers.'' ''The mood outside,'' recalled Stacie Geller, one of the women picketing, ''was angry.'' ''Stop Violence Against Women,'' read one of their signs. ''Don't Pay, Stay Away,'' read another. ''Quintin Dailey Must Go,'' read a third. The signs all had to do with Quintin Dailey. Quintin Dailey is a 6-foot-3-inch, 180-pound rookie guard with the Bulls, their first-round draft choice out of the University of San Francisco, where he made all-American. Dailey, 21 years old, had, a few months before, pleaded guilty to a nonsexual charge of aggravated assault of a woman who was a student nurse living in the same college dormitory as Dailey. The facts of the case remain clouded.

year-old Dutch Colonial building that houses Rutgers University's administrative offices, sits on the crest of a slope overlooking the heart of the state university's main campus here. The image of an institution on a hill extended beyond the physical in recent months as the drinking-age issue grew into an ideological debate between people from the university trying to maintain it at 19 and two citizens' groups that lobbied for an increase to 21. Not only did the two sides disagree about the legislation, but they also disagreed over the focus of each other's positions. Each side maintained that its position was the one that looked realistically at alcohol and drunken-driving problems. Those who expect the increase in the minimum age - which was approved last week and goes into effect Jan. 1 - to be a major step in solving the problems have been called dreamers; their opponents have been accused of using too much theory and philosophy.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Farber is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES Many directors shy away from working with movie stars because they fear that their own authority will be challenged by insecure actors with oversized egos. But Sydney Pollack has worked with major stars on every one of his 13 films. He has directed Robert Redford five times (in such films as ''Jeremiah Johnson'' and ''Three Days of the Condor''), Jane Fonda twice (in ''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' and ''The Electric Horseman''), and has also guided Barbra Streisand in ''The Way We Were,'' Al Pacino in ''Bobby Deerfield,'' Paul Newman and Sally Field in last year's ''Absence of Malice.'' Although most of these stars have reputations for being strong-willed, Mr. Pollack has managed to control them and has often drawn from them the best performances of their careers. In ''Tootsie'' Mr. Pollack has once again collaborated with a superstar - Dustin Hoffman, making his first movie since he won his Academy Award for ''Kramer vs. Kramer.'' In a radical departure from that film, Mr. Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an out-of-work actor who resuscitates his career by dressing as a woman, turning himself into ''Dorothy Michaels'' and winning a part on a television soap opera. His identity crisis intensifies when he falls in love with an actress on the show (played by Jessica Lange).

FIRST in the early 1970's came the idea of an MX missile as a counterbalance to large Soviet land-based missiles. Then came the notion that Soviet missiles had become so accurate and powerful they could destroy American land-based missiles in their silos. Finally came the search for a way to base the MX so it could survive a Soviet attack and come out fighting.