Seyla Benhabib et al., Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, ISBN0-262-52427-9, pp. 337–341 visible via online preview at books.google.com – The Bernstein Affair, which "has gone down in the annals of academe as one of the most contested cases of tenure in the United States" and which involved all-night protests and thousands of picketing students. Colleague Robert Brumbaugh characterizes the situation by saying "We could not have gotten tenure for Aristotle when he was thirty-two...[and personally] I could not have gotten it." Hanson, a newcomer to the department, was deliberately placed in the difficult position of doing "dirty work" for others, for which he drew much animus. Frustrated, Hanson wrote a contentious open letter to the New York Times to explain his thinking, concluding that although Bernstein's writing was "well-structured, clever, and urbane," it was "uniformly unoriginal"; he feared that basing tenure decisions on popularity risked turning Yale into a "banana republic university, drifting aimlessly on the winds of student preference." Negative repercussions over the affair damaged the prestige of Yale and its Department of Philosophy for years.
