The University of Colorado’s 5-4 decision to shutter its journalism school leaves challenges for the school’s Center for Environmental Journalism. An uncertain future — but one that could open up new opportunities — awaits.

Another of the nation’s well-established and well-regarded university environmental journalism programs is entering a period of change with uncertainty about whether the outcome will be bad — and if so how bad — for coverage of natural resources issues.

The University of Colorado’s journalism school is the first college to be shut down in the 134-year-old university’s history, felled by a 5-4 vote by the school’s regents. One of the regents voting to close the School of Journalism and Mass Communication program promises a bright future for journalism as an academic discipline at the university. But the route toward that end remains unclear.

Falling victim to both statewide budget cuts and the changing nature of journalism in the face of myriad challenges, the school has provided institutional support for the university’s well-regarded Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ) and its Ted Scripps fellowships for environmental coverage.

With its close proximity to world-class government and federally funded research organizations National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the university’s emphasis on environmental, natural resources, and climate-related journalism issues has been viewed as a rare asset.

The closing of the journalism program comes about a year-and-a-half after the nation’s most highly regarded joint masters program in earth sciences and journalism, at Columbia University in New York, closed its doors amidst uncertainty facing the future of traditional journalism. During that time, the University of Montana in Missoula has moved to help fill the void.

In an open letter, one of the four Colorado regents in the voting minority, Joe Neguse, said the closing of the 103-year old journalism educational program raises numerous uncertainties. Along with two other dissenting regents, he said the so-called “program discontinuance” is unjustified. “Make no mistake, ‘discontinuance’ means closure,” he said.

Roadmap to Where?  Unclear

Neguse was quoted in a local newspaper after the vote as saying “I simply cannot support a road map that doesn’t tell me, or the students at CU, where we are going in the future.”

Others were more optimistic. Some argued that the university overall had not adapted sufficiently to the changing media culture, and they see new opportunities for it to now do so.

Few doubt, however, that effecting those improvements in the context of having no official on-campus department support could pose challenges in dealing with the campus politics common at many major universities.

“We have to figure out how to build a new, forward-thinking program, and what kind of administrative structure it should ultimately be part of,” said veteran reporter and CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman, who blogs frequently on climate and other related issues. “That’s a project that could take about two years,” Yulsman said.

Part of the effort, Yulsman said in a journalism listserve, will involve what for now is a new and somewhat ill-defined “Journalism-Plus” undergraduate curriculum providing double-majors but no stand-alone journalism undergraduate degree. (New York University’s highly regarded journalism program takes such an approach.)

Yulsman said CEJ, whose other co-director is veteran reporter Len Ackland, “has received unstinting support from the university’s administrators,” but he acknowledges it nonetheless faces “rough seas to navigate” as a result of the closure of the journalism school.

Expressing hope that “in the end we could come out of this stronger,” Yulsman said a strong journalism program “is still an option. But there’s a big gap between ‘option’ and ‘accomplishment.’” He said opportunities in other university programs also could prove a comfortable home for CEJ.

Across the nation, undergraduate journalism programs generally have been among the few bullish segments in an economically devastated journalism world, with enrollments often at capacity. At the same time, however, concerns have increased about the actual journalism job opportunities available for J-school graduates. Another concern is a perennial one in journalism circles: students going into the field because they are weak in mathematical and science issues and are eager to avoid courses in those fields.