As President Trump and his team dialed up the pressure on Harvard University last month, threatening to bar its international students, the school issued what was at once a warning and a plea.

“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” school officials wrote in a lawsuit asking a judge to stop the federal government’s actions.

It left unsaid what Harvard, if it were no longer Harvard, would become.

It’s a scenario that some inside Harvard are beginning to imagine and plan for as the Trump administration lobs attacks from all angles, seeking to cut the university off from both students and billions of dollars in federal funding.

Top leaders at Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest universities, including its provost, John F. Manning, a conservative legal scholar who once clerked for the former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, are meeting more frequently to strategize.

The school’s board of trustees, the Harvard Corporation, has discussed whether hundreds, if not thousands, of people will need to be laid off.

And on 8:30 a.m. Zoom calls once or twice a week, administrative officials meet with senior leaders of Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate schools to share updates about the latest Trump developments, which keep coming rapid-fire.