It is scary, to read here and in The Weekly Standard, that Richard Immerman, a Michael Moore-style professor of history on leave from Temple University who engaged in “teach-ins” against the Iraq War, is employed in the higher echelons of U.S. intelligence. He has been elevated as an “ombudsman” for “analytic integrity” in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Gabriel Schoenfeld correctly tags Immerman — “a partisan in the intelligence wars” — as a fox in charge of the hen house. Recently Immerman published an essay excoriating the “Bushites” for “lying,” i.e., doing all possible to “cook” the intelligence books before the invasion of Iraq.

While at Temple, writes Schoenfeld, Immerman was served with a lawsuit. The student who filed it, Christian M. DeJohn, was a master’s candidate in history. Also a decorated tank commander who served on a counterterrorism mission in Bosnia, he clashed with Immerman about some of the professor’s left-wing opinions. Here is the rest of this tangled tale, which leads one to ask how Immerman received security clearance in the first place — and whether there’s any hope for even-handed political expression at Temple.