Robert W. Fuller, "who crusaded against what he defined as rankism--the denigration of society's outcasts and underachievers as 'nobodies'--even though he himself, as a physics professor, college president and prolific author, was indubitably a 'somebody,' " died July 15, the New York Times reported. He was 88.
 |
|
| Robert W. Fuller | |
In 2017, he facetiously thanked President Trump for "giving rankism a face--his own scowling, mocking face"--to become "the poster boy for rankism and for jump-starting a Dignity Movement."
Fuller was a math and physics prodigy "who never graduated from high school and never earned a bachelor's degree (though he obtained advance degrees)," the Times wrote. He was 15 when he entered Oberlin College, and 33 when he returned to become the college's youngest president.
A self-described "citizen diplomat," he arranged exchanges between Soviet and American scientists to foster better relations during the Cold War. He started the nonprofit Hunger Project with singer, songwriter, and actor John Denver and EST founder Werner Erhard to challenge "systems of inequity that create hunger and cause it to persist." He also helped start Internews, which aimed to help journalists develop free and fair media coverage.
In many of his books, Fuller wrote that rankism "manifests itself perniciously in many ways. They include, he said, lifetime academic tenure, which insulates college faculty from accountability to students and administrators, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons," the Times reported.
His first book, Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (2003), had blurbs from Betty Friedan, Francis Fukuyama, and Studs Terkel, who called it a "wonderful and tremendously important book."
Fuller's other books include All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (a sequel to Somebodies and Nobodies, 2006); Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism (with Pamela Gerloff, 2008); Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship? (2012); Genomes, Menomes, Wenomes: Neuroscience and Human Dignity (2013); The Rowan Tree: A Novel (2013); and Questions and Quests: A Short Book of Aphorisms (2016).
Insisting he had nothing against hierarchies, Fuller "espoused what he described as a dignity movement, the goal of which was to achieve a 'dignitarian society.' Its platform was encapsulated in a manifesto that paraphrased Marx and Engels: 'Nobodies of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your shame,' " the Times wrote.
in a q&a with himself on his blog, Fuller warned that rankism "stifles initiative, taxes productivity, harms health and stokes revenge.... We do believe that once you identify a problem, it's solvable," he wrote. "What I haven't mentioned is that solving old problems reveals new ones. From you we learned 'it takes a village.' Going forward, it's going to take a galaxy."