The following text is coppied from Wikipedia:

Richard J. Bernstein (born May 14, 1932) is an American philosopher, the Vera List Professor of Philosophy and former dean of the graduate faculty at The New School.[1][2]

Bernstein grew up as part of a middle-class Jewish family in Borough Park, Brooklyn; his family moved to Long Island, New York following World War II.[3] He received an A.B (1951) from the University of Chicago, a B.S. summa cum laude (1953) from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. (1958) from Yale University. He took a faculty position at Yale, but in 1965, the university denied him tenure despite the initial unanimous support of his department, leading to student protests[4][5][6][7][8][9] and eventually to reforms of the tenure system at Yale.[10][11] This event, now called the Bernstein Affair, was “one of the most contested cases of tenure in the United States.”[3] Bernstein then moved to a tenured position at Haverford College,[12] where he taught for 23 years and became the T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy before later moving to The New School.[1] At The New School, the Richard J. Bernstein Endowed Prize Fellowship in Philosophy is awarded to distinguished philosophy students in his honor.[13] In 1981, Bernstein became founding co-editor of Praxis International, the revived journal of the Yugoslav Praxis School philosophical movement. In 1988, he served as President of the Metaphysical Society of America.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Bernstein)

An excerpt of the preface written by the author, about the main idea of the whole book:

No Ameican philosopher has been more widely discussed and criticized than John Dewey. Yet despite this -- or perhaps because of this -- there is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about what he really believed and what is the heart of his philosophic outlook. I have tried to present a sympathetic, comprehensive statement of Dewey's intellectual vision. I believe that this is the most effective way to discover what Dewey "stood for" and, thereby, enable us to evaluate his contribution to philosophic inquiry and American thought.