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 on July 15 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 88.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Claire Sheridan, said.
Dr. Fuller mounted what some professed somebodies dismissed as a quixotic campaign: He sought to bestow dignity on everybody, as an antidote to what he said was bullying by overbearing bosses, power-hungry politicians, holier-than-thou moralists and even supercilious academics — all of them, in his view, guilty of “belittling, derision, corruption, harassment and self-aggrandizement.”
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.”
Between his own intervals in “Nobodyland,” as he put it, Dr. Fuller served as president of Oberlin College in Ohio in the early 1970s and was a self-described “citizen diplomat,” arranging exchanges between Soviet and American scientists to foster better relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.
In the 1970s, he started the nonprofit Hunger Project with the singer and songwriter John Denver and Werner Erhard, the founder of the confrontational self-help organization Erhard Seminars Training (EST); its stated mission: to challenge “systems of inequity that create hunger and cause it to persist.” He also helped start Internews, another nonprofit, which works with journalists around the world to develop free and fair media coverage.
Rankism, Dr. Fuller wrote in several books, 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, which, he told The New York Times in 2004, “makes nobodies of all of us.”
He insisted that he had nothing against hierarchies; he even went so far as to acknowledge that “rank can be a useful organizational tool that, used respectfully, helps facilitate cooperation,” and that “eliminating rank is a recipe for stagnation.”
What he opposed, he wrote on his blog, was “somebodies using the power of their rank to humiliate or disadvantage those they see as nobodies.”
“Rankism is no more defensible than racism, sexism, homophobia,” he wrote. “In fact, rankism — putting people down and keeping them there — is the mother of all the ignoble isms.”
Dr. 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.”
Dr. Fuller’s first book, “Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank” (2003), drew endorsements from the likes of Bill Moyers, Betty Friedan and Studs Terkel, all of whom contributed blurbs. (“A wonderful and tremendously important book,” Mr. Terkel wrote.)
But some critics called him naïve. One reviewer dismissed the book as a compendium of bromides so platitudinous that they “were old when Jesus was making fishers of men.”
If Dr. Fuller’s dignity movement was neither revolutionary nor original, though, it nonetheless represented “my vision of the world with no one left out,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Belonging.” His manifesto resonated in a polarized society and inspired other initiatives to promote humanitarianism and ban nuclear weapons.
A math and physics prodigy who never graduated from high school and never earned a bachelor’s degree (though he obtained advance degrees), Dr. Fuller was 15 when he entered Oberlin College. In 1970, at 33, he returned to become the college’s youngest president.
Serving for nearly four years during a tumultuous era on college campuses, Dr. Fuller oversaw changes in the curriculum and the school calendar, increased independent study, tripled minority enrollment, established a Commission on the Status of Women and created a Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies.
He did not endear himself to the faculty, though, describing it as politically progressive but reluctant to experiment. He tried to limit tuition discounts for professors’ children and opposed lifetime tenure, which he derided as “an outdated, sacrosanct privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many nobodies.”
To run Oberlin’s physical education department, he hired Jack Scott, a prominent activist in athletics known for his criticism of its professional sports. Mr. Scott recruited a number of Black coaches, a highly unusual move for a predominantly white college at the time.
From 1968 to 1970, Dr. Fuller had been a physics professor and dean of the faculty at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he integrated women into the student body and recruited more students from minority groups.
In 1974, when he retired from Oberlin after 22 years in academia as either a student or professor, he was only 37. He traveled; moved to Berkeley, Calif.; read scores of books; and sounded alarms over food scarcity and, until the end of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation.
His citizen diplomacy mission was underwritten in part by Robert Cabot, a novelist and diplomat who had inherited a family fortune.
Robert Works Fuller was born on Oct. 26, 1936, in Summit, N.J., His family descended from English immigrants who arrived in America in 1634. His father, Calvin S. Fuller, worked for Bell Laboratories, where he was an inventor of the solar battery. His mother, Willmine (Works) Fuller, was a civic volunteer and a member of the local school board.
Despite (or perhaps because of) a fairly strict upbringing (he was once locked in his bedroom for two days for refusing to eat his spinach), he developed a deep sense of empathy early on. He never forgot the day in the second grade when he saw a girl named Arlene summarily ordered by her teacher to leave the classroom and stand in the hall all day because she hadn’t cleaned her fingernails.
A science whiz, Robert was tirelessly curious. He experimented with a hand-held calculator to prove that time travel, backward at least, was impossible. He starved himself to see how long a human being could go without food (in his case, two days).
Raised in Chatham, N.J., he left high school at 15 to enroll at Oberlin under a Ford Foundation fellowship. But he left after three years for a better curriculum in science and math at Princeton. He never earned a bachelor’s degree there, but, mentored by senior faculty, he earned a master’s and, in 1961, a doctorate in physics.
After graduating from Princeton, he attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and then studied economics at the University of Chicago. He began his academic career as a lecturer in physics in 1966 at Columbia University, where he helped write the textbook “Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics.” He would go on to write a dozen books, including a novel, “The Rowan Tree” (2013).
His marriage to Ann Lackritz, in 1959, ended in divorce. He married Alia Johnson in 1978; they separated in 1990, and she died in 2010. In 1995, he married Claire Sheridan. She survives him, along with a daughter and a son from his first marriage, Karen Lackritz Fuller and Benjamin; a son, Adam, from his second marriage; a stepson, Noah Johnson; his brother, Stephen; and four grandchildren.
Warning that rankism “stifles initiative, taxes productivity, harms health and stokes revenge,” Dr. Fuller acknowledged that challenging human nature would be daunting.
“We do believe that once you identify a problem, it’s solvable,” he wrote in a Q&A with himself on his blog. “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.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
The post Robert W. Fuller, Who Championed Dignity Over ‘Rankism,’ Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
