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.
Somebodies and Nobodies by Robert W. Fuller New Society Pub., $23.95
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 résumé
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 revolution--graduate teaching
assistants? The Roman Catholic laity?--is not entirely
clear.)
Fuller admits that Somebodies and Nobodies is a personal
book, neither scholarly nor academic. And though "rankism"
sounds hopelessly P.C.--the kind of problem we didn't know
we had until some well-meaning Barnard peer counselor
thought it up--it's hard to disagree that abusing one's
authority is a bad thing. But while Fuller acknowledges
that "rank" is essential for humans working in hierarchies,
and that striving for more rank brings one recognition and
power--things that most people enjoy--his distinctions
between rank and rankism are hard to follow. In practice,
it is apparently all right for physics professors to
return, unread, manuscripts from hopeful but unlettered
supplicants who claim to refute Einstein, since otherwise
the professors would not have time to read each other's
manuscripts. On the other hand, he says, it is never all
right to bark at waitstaff for any real or imagined
transgressions.
Fuller believes that rankism is ubiquitous and eternal, but
that's not necessarily true. In the business world, for
instance, hierarchy--which Fuller tags as the progenitor of
rankism--is slowly becoming yesterday's mode of organizing
human activity. Market-based and decentralized,
network-based activities are becoming widely adopted as
more-viable alternatives. Rankism may turn out to be
yesterday's problem; as more young Americans become
entrepreneurs, smaller and flatter organizations will
reduce the range of rankism. (Certainly rankism is, to some
degree, a peculiarly Western institution: A Zen master
might well worry about a student's inner state if the
student became preoccupied by rank, either high or low.)
Since the problems described in Somebodies and Nobodies are
anecdotal--albeit universal--it's hard to evaluate Fuller's
argument that the Somebodies will benefit by eliminating
rankism when dealing with Nobodies. And, of course, it is
the Somebodies who must change their behavior.
Nevertheless, the case can be made. For his book Good to
Great, James Collins sifted through the 1435 firms that
have ever been in the Fortune 500. He found only 11 firms
that demonstrated periods of exceptional performance; that
is, generated cumulative stock returns that beat the
general stock market by an average of seven times in 15
years. Notably, all 11 had CEOs who were promoted from
within, intensely focused on success, and--most
interestingly--humble. "Humble" is Collins's word, and by it
he means a CEO who would listen to anyone, anytime, who
might have something to offer to the CEO's quest for
success. In other words, these CEOs eliminated every trace
of rankism from their work lives--and they, and their
companies, won big.
Robert Fuller's book paints a compelling portrait of an
unhappy world, but fails at leading us to a better one.
Somebodies and Nobodies boasts no fewer than 30
prepublication endorsements. Twenty-seven of the endorsers
are identified by their institutional connections or the
books they've published.
