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When hyper-militarized, hierarchical Sparta attacked open, democratic Athens in 431 BCE, the Athenians hunkered down for war by calling the denizens of their outlying farmlands into the city center, where all could be protected behind high walls, while the Spartans laid waste to their lands.

This is roughly how the current conflict between Harvard and the Trump administration is getting started. The residents of our research labs — particularly in medicine and the natural sciences — are being required to abandon the plots they are working to protect the defining features of our University’s way of life: academic freedom, due process, and the liberty of civil society associations.

We have to hope — and work to ensure — that it goes differently from here for us than it did for the Athenians. Densely compressed into their urban center, the Athenians found themselves newly vulnerable to disease and were ravaged by plague. Suffering and loss drove blame and strife. Plague was followed by civil discord. This weakened Athens to such an extent that in the end the city gave way to Sparta.

We too will find ourselves “densifying” our enterprise. Shrinking our near-term footprint and minimizing layoffs will require us to concentrate our efforts and change — for instance, by rebalancing energy and effort in the medical and health disciplines toward education to the extent possible. In my civic education lab at the Education School, we have spent the last two months — in the wake of the termination of a $6 million grant — re-organizing in just that spirit.

To make the finances work will also require the University to break free of our current model where every school is a tub on its own bottom; we will need a more centralized budget approach. If researchers in far-flung lands are losing labs to protect the city center, the city center and its residents should help pay for their adaptations. This crisis may finally make former University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s promise of “One Harvard” a reality.

Securing the unity necessary, though, to steer through this moment will require real work. This is where the effort to establish a University-wide faculty senate comes in. Perhaps the most important thing that has happened in the senate planning process to date — though not quite captured in our progress report — is that faculty in schools other than the medical school are beginning to understand the medical school, and vice versa.

We understand why we are linked together and what we have in common — love of truth and discovery; a commitment to the public good and to rising generations. We are also facing where we differ — in styles of school governance and internal structure, allocations of faculty time and responsibilities, and degree of reliance on soft-money funding models.

If unity is one project we must pursue while litigation proceeds (whatever form litigation may take), another is alliances. Harvard, with a total campus population of faculty, students, and staff of roughly 45,000 is something like a city-state. Like Athens, which had a far-flung network of allied democratic colonies, Harvard too has a diaspora of over 400,000 alumni worldwide and 35 million learners through Harvard Online.

We are not small. We will need to call on our former students to speak publicly whenever and wherever they can about what they appreciate about their alma mater, and to name what we can do better, joining us in our internal conversations about how to improve our work. We will also need to prove that we hear and can learn from the truths they tell us.

Yet an even more important ally is the American people. The American people have for many decades given us great gifts — decades of generous support for research, as well as young people to educate and financial support for those students.

The first rule of stewarding any philanthropic relationship is to say thank you. This is something we have not done enough. We are already quite busy informing the American people of what we do for the country, through our scientific research. And we do indeed do great things for this nation and the world. But before we vaunt our own accomplishments, we should stop for a minute to show gratitude.

While the lawyers are busy with Washington, the rest of us should focus on the rest of the country. We should tap some of our resources to publish simple thank you letters in every paper in the nation and across digital platforms, and all of us who find ourselves on the road to give talks should spread a message of thanks.

We do a lot for the American people, yes, but we also owe the American people profoundly. Our service is not onerous. We love it. And the American people have made much of it possible. If we stop and remember that, and start there in all our actions, and say thank you, we will make it through this hard time, and become a stronger, better university. The world still remembers and visits Athens, not so much Sparta.

Thank you, America, for what you have given us for all these years. We remain steadfast in being at your service.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and of the Democratic Knowledge Project.