EDITORIAL : FAIR PLAY.

BACK in 1997, former California State University, Northridge, President Blenda Wilson cut four men's sports teams, including the highly successful baseball and soccer programs, during the summer break without a word of warning to the students.

After months of anger and controversy, state Sen. Cathie Wright, R-Simi Valley, came to the rescue and saved the programs by getting state money to keep them afloat.

While CSUN's athletes were spared from being cut loose and trying to transfer to other schools where their scholarships would be honored, the chance remained that a surprise announcement to kill a sport could happen at any time on any of the campuses in the CSU, University of California and community college systems.

Wright has a plan that would protect students, coaches and their families and supporters from having to go through the CSUN experience.

She has made a simple proposal in Senate Bill 338 that would require CSU, UC and community college schools to give a one-year notice when a sport is going to be canceled. The bill requires the schools to hold public hearings on proposed eliminations.

The bill cruised through the Senate, 26-4, but stalled in the Assembly Higher Education Committee where opposition came from Democrats, such as Assemblyman Jack Scott, the former president of Pasadena City College and other college and university bureaucrats.

They claimed the bill's one-year notice is unfair to cash-strapped schools that might have to operate a money-losing athletic team for an extra season and proposed a ``compromise'' that would require school presidents to announce they were killing sports programs within 30 days of the end of that sport's season.

Scott's reasoning behind the 30-day proposal was preposterous. In a public meeting, in front of athletes from all over the state, he said it would be a tremendous loss of morale for players to play a season knowing it was the team's last.

What bunk. And he was told so by 1999 Pan American Games heavyweight wrestling champ Stephen Neal, who grappled for California State University, Bakersfield. Neal said athletes seek to overcome obstacles, not succumb to them. He added that athletes would have the added incentive of trying to impress coaches at other schools to recruit them when the program is eliminated.

The arguments - cogent, mature and sensible in ways Scott did not understand - failed to convince the Assembly committee members. So Wright has taken the bill out of consideration this legislative session and pledged to reintroduce it in January.

We urge Scott and others to reconsider Neal's arguments as well as these:

When a college drops an academic major, administrators usually allow students already in the program to get their degrees in that field. When University of California, Davis, cut its rhetoric program, students already enrolled in it were allowed to finish. Some were given more than a year's notice.

Colleges recruit impressionable 18-year-olds to make a huge commitment to them in agreeing to scholarships. If a football player signs a letter of intent to play at Northridge in the spring, telling all other schools that had recruited him that he is no longer interested, and the school drops the program over the summer, the player is out of luck.

It is a complete fraud on the part of the university to woo students and then drop them. It is not an unreasonable consideration for college administrators to have enough control over what they are doing budgetarily to make curriculum or athletic changes a year in advance.

If people are making choices and making commitments, universities ought to be bound by the same rules.