Robert Fuller earned his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University and taught at Columbia, where he co-authored the text Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics. He then served as president of Oberlin College, his alma mater. For a dozen years, beginning in 1978, he worked in what came to be known as “citizen diplomacy” to improve the Cold War relationship. During the 1990s, he served as board chair of the non-profit global corporation Internews, which promotes democracy via free and independent media. With the end of the Cold war and the collapse of the USSR, Fuller looked back reflectively on his career and understood that he had been, at different junctures in his life, a somebody and a nobody. His periodic sojourns into “Nobodyland” led him to identify and probe rankism—abuse of the power inherent in rank—and ultimately to write Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (New Society Publishers, 2003). Three years later, he published a sequel that focuses on building a “dignitarian” society titled All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Berrett-Koehler, 2006). With co-author Pamela Gerloff, he has also published Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism (Berrett-Koehler, 2008).
Courtesy of Robert W. Fuller's Official Site.