SPOILER ALERT: Shortly after midnight, while most of us were asleep, Harvard University rescinded Chelsea Manning’s invitation, due to backlash like that described below.

Integrity, it is said, is doing the right thing when no one is looking. But just because people are looking doesn’t mean it still isn’t the right thing to do, or that one lacks integrity. I’ve been critical of former Deputy Director (and two-time Acting Director) of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Morell, but yesterday afternoon, he quite publicly did the right thing, for all the right reasons. As critical as I’ve been, I will call him a man of integrity.

After leaving government service in January, Morell became a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center, part of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Yesterday, in the wake of the announcement that Harvard had appointed convicted spy Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow in the school’s Institute of Politics, Morrell “hit the slide” in spectacular fashion.

In a letter obtained by CBS News, Morrell told Douglas W. Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School, that he “cannot be part of an organization… that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information.” Just to refresh your memory, in case you’ve been living in Ted Kazinsky’s old cabin since January, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Private First Class Bradley Manning, was until recently a guest of the nation at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Manning, Morell reminds the dean, was convicted of “17 serious crimes, including six counts of espionage, for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks.” Yet since having her sentence commuted by President Obama, Manning has been the subject of a sexy swimsuit spread in Vogue, and was set to be paid by the nation’s oldest university to tell future leaders how brave she was to download the contents of the SIPRNet and send them to a narcissistic online troll.

John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy himself are no doubt rolling furiously in their graves over the decision to grant a person who is arguably a traitor a position, even a temporary one, on the Harvard faculty. George W. Bush, while not yet rolling in a grave (much to the dismay of the radical left, I’m sure) is no doubt displeased with fellow Harvard alumnus Barack Obama’s commutation of Manning’s sentence.

In announcing Manning’s appointment, Harvard said, “Following her court martial conviction in 2013 for releasing confidential military and State Department documents, President Obama commuted her 35-year sentence, citing it as ‘disproportionate’ to the penalties faced by other whistleblowers.”

Dear Harvard: Manning is not a whistleblower. She didn’t go to the press or Congress with any evidence of government malfeasance. She copied classified documents by the megabyte and released them into the wild. These documents, at the very least, resulted in the deaths of brave Iraqi and Afghan allies of the U.S.

The fact that the Belfer Center’s new director is former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter makes the appointment all that much more difficult to fathom. It would seem Carter has forgotten everything he learned in his time inside the funny five-sized building on the Potomac. Fortunately, Morell reminded him what service to the nation is all about.

“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country,” Morell wrote, “to stand up to any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”

I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

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Tom McCuin is a strategic communication consultant and retired Army Reserve Civil Affairs and Public Affairs officer whose career includes serving with the Malaysian Battle Group in Bosnia, two tours in Afghanistan, and three years in the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs in the Pentagon. When he’s not devouring political news, he enjoys sailboat racing and umpiring Little League games (except the ones his son plays in) in Alexandria, Va. Follow him on Twitter at @tommccuin