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Academics meets community service in Bill Smith’s popular Business Ethics and Society course (MGMT 482). On the academic side, the course gives senior business administration majors an

	Jarrett Brown volunteered at Callaway Elementary School in Baltimore.

opportunity to study interactions between business and its non-economic environments: ethical reasoning, stakeholder analysis, corporate responsibility, crisis management, and the political process.

	Ernesto Lopez also volunteered at Callaway Elementary.

Equally important is Smith’s requirement that each student contribute 10 hours of community service to a Baltimore-area nonprofit—about two to four days of work over the course of the term.

Smith says his course is a natural place to integrate service-learning—which TU President Robert L. Caret encourages—with traditional classroom instruction. “It’s also a good way to teach students about community needs,” he adds. “They learn how nonprofit organizations serve communities and the role businesses play when they forge partnerships with nonprofits.

	Volunteer Krystle Miciche assists with health check-ups at Wildlife Rescue Inc. in Hampstead, Md.

“The key thing is that students can work for causes they support,” he says. Smith’s extensive contacts database enables him to match MGMT 482 volunteers with food banks, homeless shelters, after-school mentoring programs, animal welfare groups, environmental organizations and other worthy-but-understaffed organizations from the contacts database he maintains.

“They need help,” he says of the nonprofits, “and my students need the experience.”

	Amanda Keller feeds the animals as a volunteer at Wildlife Rescue Inc.

But do the students themselves see their contributions as meaningful? Nearly all of them do, says Smith. “On the evaluation forms, about three quarters say the volunteer experience was the most beneficial part of the course.”