April 9, 1993

Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez yesterday called for changing New York City's force of 3,000 school safety officers into a better-trained, better-educated department modeled in many ways on big city police departments. While the officers would not carry guns, they would be hired, trained and promoted in much the same way as New York City police officers are.

In the library, at home, even between cuts in the operating room, the prospect of dramatic change in the health-care system is the talk among medical students in this city known as a mecca for future doctors because of its concentration of teaching hospitals and medical schools. "We'll be in the O.R. taking out an extra pair of gloves, and someone will say, 'You're wasting those gloves, Hillary wouldn't like that,' " said Mark Brown, a fourth-year student at Tufts University School of Medicine. Expecting Less Freedom Mr. Brown and his fellow students say they know they will have less freedom in their practices than their predecessors in the profession, who earned an average of $170,600 in 1991, and they expect to earn less money, particularly if they go into specialties like ophthalmology, radiology or cardiac surgery, which have traditionally been among the highest paid. They seem resigned to the end of what many refer to as the golden age of medicine.

PAYING a visit to the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan is a lot like passing an average afternoon in front of the tube. Except without the snacks, the commercials, the interruptions to answer the phone, the sound of your neighbor's lawn mower, the familiar couch or, finally, anything that really resembles a television set. As television has taken over our culture, most of us have come to treat it much as we treat our parents: as a force that is always there, is often distracting, but rarely commands our undivided attention. The museum, where television is an object of research, even reverence, isn't about such heedless intimacy. An afternoon there can thus be a disconcerting -- and oddly revelatory -- experience.

In an era when staying alive is a major feat for a downtown shopping district, North Michigan Avenue's "Magnificent Mile" of department stores and boutiques is a standout in that it has continued to live up to its name. "I don't think there's another street like it in the country," said Robert Middlemas, general manager of Midwest operations for Nordstrom Inc., a high-end department store chain that has been unable, to its dismay, to find a store site on the broad stretch of the avenue north of the Chicago River. "It's a Mecca for shopping."

Nothing can heal the wound left when the Brooklyn Dodgers packed up their bats and balls and headed to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. But yesterday, Brooklyn got a small measure of revenge. A Federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the Brooklyn Dodger Sports Bar and Restaurant could keep its name in the face of a legal effort by the Los Angeles Dodger organization to take even that shred of identity away from Brooklyn.