Rank prejudice.

• Author: Knisely, Robert
• Position: Book Review

SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES Overcoming the Abuse of Rank by Robert W. Fuller New Society Pub., $23.95

ONCE UPON A TIME, ROBERT W. Fuller was a Somebody: physics professor at Columbia and author of a classic textbook. In 1970--the year of the Kent State massacre--Fuller, then only 33, was named president of Oberlin College. After four tumultuous years fully engaged with students protesting both the war and their role in college governance, he left to "recharge his batteries." But after this sabbatical, he discovered, his old colleagues wouldn't listen to his ideas, and soon wouldn't return his calls. Without an institution backing him, he was a Nobody. He learned about what he calls the Somebody Mystique from the outside. His new book, Somebodies and Nobodies, grew out of that experience.

The problem, Fuller came to realize, was rankism. By his definition, rankism is the abuse of rank--the denial of the inherent dignity of every person. Rankism is everywhere, he claims, and makes almost everyone feel invisible and inconsequential at one time or another in his or her life, whether during the first days of junior high school, starting college or a new job, being unemployed, or even awaking one day to realize you're retired. Being a Nobody means not getting your calls returned or your resume read--not being recognized as inherently worthy of attention. In less genteel surroundings, it means never finding work and always going hungry. Relations between parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, and employer and employee are too often soured by rankism, says Fuller. Indignity in the home stunts personal growth; in the academy it sabotages learning; in the shop it taxes productivity. International rankism by the United States evokes terrorists in the developing world, where most people live in chronic indignity.

"The fact that life isn't fair doesn't mean we have to be unfair to each other," Fuller argues. Now that racism and sexism are on the run, he believes, rankism--"the mother of all -isms"--should be the next to go. Fuller believes that all the other "-isms" are but subspecies of rankism, which must first be called out wherever and whenever it appears, and then negotiated out of all of our social institutions. What the world needs, he argues, is a Nobody Revolution, a Dignitarian Revolution, leading to a redistribution of rank as a first step toward global economic justice. (Who Fuller thinks should foment this...