How does Cabot feel about the way his money has been spent? "I am immensely gratified," he said. "I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse of rankism in Washington, right now. Our policy in the Middle East is rankism."
rankism's many guises
Fuller acknowledges that rankism is harder to pin down than other more apparent forms of discrimination -- sex, race and disability. "We try to sniff how much power each of us has by asking: `What do you do? Where did you go to school? Who's your husband?'" said Fuller.
"It's like trying to find out if someone's gay or not, if they're a threat to us or if we can get away with abusing or exploiting them."
Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, but neither is he simply asking for mere politeness. Controversially, he would get rid of faculty tenure at universities, which he calls "an outdated sacrosanct privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many nobodies."
Fuller doesn't rouse his audiences with smooth patter and startling revelations of abuse he's suffered. But his reflective, old-fashioned professorial approach to his sometimes glib, populist theories has been taken in some quarters as a refreshing whiff of sincerity in a skeptical age.
When he spoke at Mount Holyoke College last September, Andrea Ayvazian, dean of religious life, was surprised to see how mixed the audience was: students, faculty members, administrators, staff members and campus workers. "Bob's analysis freed people who considered themselves low in the hierarchy to tell their stories," said Ayvazian, who was a student of Fuller's 30 years earlier. "I saw this had struck a chord in unpredictable circles."
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