Successful survival strategies for academic departments threatened with closure Every now and again, academic departments are threatened with closure by university administrations.
One current example: Pure Mathematics in Leicester is under threat of closure (making academic staff redundant).
What successful strategies have departments been able to use to see off threats like this?
Once you are threatened with closure, it is probably too late to fix your problems.
Increase enrollment of new students with marketing.
Increase retention of students with better teaching and extracurricular experiences.
Seek donations.
Find a new source of revenue.
Unionize.  A union contract can force cross-subsidies from money-making departments to money-losing departments instead of closure.  However, this will not work if there are no money-making departments.

These decisions are all about money, and there's no easy way to get money.
A more detailed answer: https://ep3guide.org/toolkit