I guess we should be honored.

Green Corps is favoring 11 universities with a paid anti-coal organizer, and we are one of them.

Our guy is Ryan Doyle from Minnesota, and while he may blend in with the students with his boyish looks, don’t be fooled. He’s no amateur. He's paid to start this Beyond Coal group here.

Monday’s kickoff meeting of Beyond Coal was decidedly the most effective meeting of a student organization I’ve ever seen. Doyle and associates snapped through environmental facts, introduced a keynote speaker, trained students on how to work the media and broke the group into discussion circles—and had everyone out within the hour.

Doyle is a paid professional and he certainly gets the job done. This would explain what was previously a baffling fact to me: why MU students suddenly care about coal.

You didn’t hear a murmur about coal last year. If anything, students who read up on these types of things would comment that it was good that our power plant had started using renewable resources.

Then all of a sudden, students are smearing coal on their faces and piling coal on the ground and writing letters to protest this atrocity. They are filling to capacity anti-coal meetings advertising free food. They are in the headlines of major newspapers as passionate students with a cause.

All I have to say is, WTF?

I would hope, students, that this really is your cause, and you don’t just respond this way to anyone who comes handing out free T-shirts.

But I find it hard to believe you guys are serious.

Take for instance, the fact that I couldn’t get even a ballpark estimate from Doyle of how much it would cost to get our campus off coal. (Obviously, none of the students had a remote guess either.)

How serious can you be if you aren’t looking at cost—at a university where the word “furlough” keeps coming up?

If you aren’t looking at the cost, if you aren't talking to the university, if you're just taking photos for your media campaign—then I’m forced to assume this is all political posturing.

I will admit, I am impressed at the nice photo ops and headlines you’ve snagged so quickly. Save them well. Whether or not anything actually happens with MU coal, you’ll always have those clippings to show your grandchildren when you talk about your bold, activist youth.