The letter issued today by the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, complains about what he describes as “a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body.”

What Dr. Garber calls a “refusal to surrender,” though, is what the Trump administration and a lot of Americans might more accurately call a “refusal to shape up.” Dr. Garber and out-of-touch lawyers, administrators, professors, and deans are blaming the government rather than taking responsibility for their own mismanagement.

That mismanagement — misplaced priorities, inept execution, a decentralized structure, and a culture of complacency enabled by a big endowment and by patient and generous donors — has gotten Harvard into the trouble it is now in. The decision by Dr. Garber and the Harvard Corporation to portray themselves as heroes reminds of an earlier Harvard administration, under Lawrence Bacow and with Dr. Garber as provost, waging a long and costly legal battle to defend race-based preferences in admissions.

When Harvard eventually lost that fight in the Supreme Court, the university, rather than expressing regret or apologizing for discriminating, blamed the justices for having supposedly changed the law, which was the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. Harvard, then as now, tried to claim that its illegal behavior was somehow protected under the First Amendment and “academic freedom.”

There was no public price paid for the loss. No one was fired from Harvard for discriminating. No one was punished. If anything, they were lauded by the liberal press and their colleagues in higher education for having fought as long and as hard as they did to preserve the discriminatory system. It’s just hard to reach Harvard levels of self-congratulation.

Now the smart move for Harvard would be to try to negotiate a settlement with President Trump. If Harvard needs to, it could  portray the moves as things it would have done anyway on its own. Mr. Trump could, one can speculate, be placated by things that could eventually happen anyway — such as the departure of Dr. Garber and a corporation senior fellow, Penny Pritzker.

To that roster might be added such senior administrators as executive vice president Meredith Weenick and the vice president for public affairs and communications, Paul Andrew. Mr. Andrew is a former aide to a former British Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, and to the European Parliamentary Labour Party at Brussels.

All that it would take for a settlement is for some Harvard Corporation member to appear with Mr. Trump, thank him, and utter the Veritas that, without the president, the pace of needed change and improvements would have been slower. So of what is Dr. Garber afraid? Everyone remembers President Claudine Gay being forced out, in part for mismanaging relations with Republicans in Washington.

People, though, tend to forget Lawrence Summers being forced out as Harvard’s president after a no-confidence vote by the faculty. Mr. Summers’ resignation letter in 2006 spoke of his “believing deeply that complacency is among the greatest risks facing Harvard.”  Harvard magazine also wrote of Summers’ view “that Harvard had become, or risked becoming, complacent; and that prodding was necessary to effect desired change.”

Two decades later, Harvard is facing similar issues and may be in even worse shape. If Dr. Garber’s priority is keeping the faculty happy rather than implementing with urgency the changes Harvard has needed for 20 years, then he’s part of the problem rather than the solution. The more Harvard sues and fights and resists and pats itself on the back, the more it confirms Mr. Trump’s basic accusation.

It is that the university is in the business of left-wing political activism and leveraged illiquid private equity investing rather than teaching, learning, and research. The antisemitism problem is a consequence of the stifling ideological conformity, the mediocrity, and the prioritization of activism over academics. 

It’s always possible that Harvard could eventually win legally. I would not bet on that, though. Either way in respect of the legal outcome, if the consequence of Harvard’s “refusal to surrender” is another decade or two of complacency and deterioration of quality, all Harvard would have done with its legal fight would be to have deceived itself — yet again — about the urgency and scale of the need for change.