Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's proposal for a University of California tuition policy that would allow Berkeley to charge nearly $2,000 a year more than other campuses is another reminder of the worst-kept secret in California education: Some UC campuses are more equal than others.

What Birgeneau called for, in a document called "Access and Excellence," was discretion for each of the system's 10 campuses to impose fees that could be as much as 25 percent above or below the standard university fee, currently just under $6,600 a year, set by the regents.

The formal regents' posture is that all the system's campuses are equal. But a thousand things say that while that's a fine democratic idea, and politically useful, they're not. Whether you measure competition for admission or the level of research or general prestige in the academic community, UC Riverside and UC Merced are not the equals of Berkeley, UCLA or UC San Diego.

In spirit, Birgeneau's proposal isn't new. In the early 1990s, during economic times that were in some ways as tough on the state budget as the current crisis, Chang-lin Tien, Birgeneau's predecessor as Berkeley chancellor, fought hard, even threatening to resign, to protect his faculty from an early-retirement program regents adopted for the rest of the system.

Tien, who was highly popular with Berkeley students and a demon fundraiser, made it clear, without ever saying so, that Berkeley, one of the world's premier research institutions, couldn't afford to lose the great faculty it had recruited over three decades. It was more deserving of protection than some other campuses.

Birgeneau's plan was explicitly founded on the relative attractiveness of different campuses. Some, he said, "might choose a lower (fee) to enhance their economic competitiveness, while others, like Berkeley, might choose a higher number. These increased revenues would substantially strengthen our financial aid programs."

At $2,000 more per year for each of its 35,000 graduate and undergraduate students, the university would realize another $70 million even though the figure would increase the total cost in room, board, fees and other costs by only about 10 percent.

Students from low- and middle- income families would be spared the increase. Better yet, he said, the additional aid generated would partly reduce the debt burden many graduate with. Nor, again in a reminder of Berkeley's competitive edge, would it deter high-income applicants.

Was all this only a sly ploy – a message for voters and for Sacramento? At their regular meeting last week, just before Birgeneau's "Access and Excellence" was released, the regents tiptoed around the thorny question of fee hikes, but there's hardly anyone who doesn't believe that higher fees will be coming, probably soon.

Birgeneau pointed out both the obvious fact that state support for higher education has declined sharply in the past 30 years and that UC was still charging less than other flagship public universities like Michigan, Penn State, the University of Virginia and Rutgers. At the same time it was equally obvious that even if Berkeley could charge $2,000 more, it wouldn't make more than a dent in the university's fiscal situation.

But the criticisms that were immediately leveled at the proposal – that it meant "the destruction of the University of California as an institution" – seemed to reinforce the message that if the state wanted a high-quality public university it had better be prepared to pay for it.

"The university," UC San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz Francisco told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter "has basically been falling apart because the fee increases, as despicable as they are, aren't big enough to cover the loss of state funding." That was certainly part of Birgeneau's message as well.

That said, however, the myth that all UC campuses are equal also deserves what these days would be called a serious conversation. New UC President Mark Yudof generated a fair amount of consternation in Texas when, as head of that state's university system, he freed the campuses to do something very much like what Birgeneau is proposing now.

In creating a string of colleges, some of them unvarnished real estate promotions to begin with, each with costly Berkeley-like research university ambitions, California has locked itself into an impossible bind. It's trying to support nine campuses as full-service universities, all treated as equals with the best, all sucking millions from the system. It's going to be nearly impossible for the state to sustain that fiction indefinitely.

The one silver lining in this recession is the shredding of UC's classic warning that if it doesn't raise salaries it won't be able to keep or attract good people. At times like this, secure teaching and administrative jobs, if they're at all available, become highly attractive. Even the super- endowed private universities are feeling the pinch. That doesn't change the need for better funding and systemic restructuring, but it does add some perspective.