Robert W. Fuller

Robert Works Fuller (born 1936) is an American physicist, author, social reformer, and former president of Oberlin College.

Fuller graduated from Oberlin College, and earned his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1961. He taught at Columbia University, where he co-authored the book Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics.

Oberlin College president

The mounting social unrest of the 1960s, and Fuller's commitment to educational reform—which he had already demonstrated as a Trinity College dean—led his alma mater, Oberlin College, in 1970, to make him its tenth president, succeeding Robert K. Carr. At age 33, Fuller became one of the youngest college presidents in U.S. history. During his Oberlin presidency—a turbulent time at Oberlin and in higher education generally—Fuller reshaped the student body by tripling the enrollment of minorities at the college. He also recruited and hired Jack Scott as Chairman of the Physical Education Dept. and Athletic Director. Scott,in turn, recruited and hired the first four African-American athletic coaches in a predominantly white American college or university, including Tommie Smith, the Gold Medalist sprinter from the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Scott and Fuller were interviewed on campus by Howard Cosell and appeared on primetime television to talk about these changes. In 1974, after four years of service as Oberlin's president, Fuller considered that he had fulfilled his mission and resigned the office.

Ventures in social reform

In 1971, on a visit to India, Fuller had witnessed the famine caused by war with Pakistan, a war that saw the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. With the election of President Jimmy Carter, Fuller began a campaign to persuade the new president to end world hunger. In 1977, Fuller co-founded The Hunger Project, along with Werner Erhard and John Denver. His June 1977 meeting with Carter in the Oval Office helped lead to the establishment of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Fuller traveled frequently to the Soviet Union, working as a citizen-scientist to improve superpower relations during the Cold War. This led to the creation of the The Mo Tzu Project, a group of citizen-diplomats traveling the world seeking citizen to citizen understanding to create sustainable peace. It also lead to the creation of the nonprofit global corporation Internews, which promotes democracy via free and independent media. For many years Fuller served as its chairman, working with Kim Spencer, David M. Hoffman and Evelyn Messinger (founders of Internews), Alia Johnson, Robert Cabot, and John Steiner, among others. In 1982, Fuller appeared in the PBS documentary Thinking Twice About Nuclear War.

With the collapse of the USSR, Fuller's turn as a citizen-diplomat came to a close. Reflecting on the different roles he had played, he came to understand that he had, at various times, enjoyed the status of a "somebody" while at other times he had embraced the position of a "nobody." His experiences in "Nobodyland" led him to identify rankism—a term he coined, and defined as the abuse of the power inherent in rank.

In 2003, Fuller published his seminal work, Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (New Society Publishers). The book inspired a group in Virginia to set up the Dignitarian Foundation. He published a sequel that focused on building a dignitarian society, titled All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Berrett-Koehler, 2006). In 2008, Fuller and co-author Pamela A. Gerloff released an 86-page "action-oriented guide" titled Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism.

An energetic evangelist for the Dignity Movement, Fuller frequently speaks at universities, conferences, and social policy organizations. Notable recent engagements include:

• National Conference on Dignity for All, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Sino-U.S. Colloquium on Core Values, Washington, D.C.
• World Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India
• Center for Therapeutic Justice, Williamsburg, VA
• National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (Keynote Speaker)
• Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Berkeley, CA
• Berkeley Carroll School (Visiting Writers Program)
• Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA
• Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
• Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris
• National Headquarters of the United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C.
• Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton Universities

Fuller currently maintains a blog at www.breakingranks.net, and he also writes regular articles for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today. His most recent book is The Rowan Tree: A Novel.

Fuller lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Claire Sheridan. He has four children and four grandchildren.