UA Establishes Initiative for Ethics and Social Responsibility

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama has established a new campus initiative to address issues related to ethics and social responsibility and to help prepare students to serve as effective, engaged ethical citizens.

The new Initiative for Ethics and Social Responsibility (IESR) will be directed by Stephen Foster Black, a newly appointed member of the UA faculty. The initiative is aimed at making the values and skills of citizenship a hallmark of a UA education.

“The University of Alabama has a critical role to play in preparing students to serve as effective, engaged and ethical citizens,” said UA President Robert E. Witt. “This new initiative will assist students in developing the qualities that define citizenship, and will provide a large number of student volunteers to address quality of life, education and economic issues in our community and our state.”

Black said IESR will seek to better connect social responsibility and ethical development to the academic mission of the University. “The initiative has the significant goal of linking curriculum and the campus culture by establishing multiple sites through which students can engage in meaningful service for academic credit and thoughtful consideration of the ethical obligations they have toward their fellow citizens,” he said.

IESR is supported by a gift from Mignon C. Smith, an Alabama resident who also resides in Washington, D.C., in honor of the lives and accomplishments of Alabama business and civic leader J. Craig Smith and his wife, Page T. Smith. In addition to funding the initiative, the gift also established the J. Craig Smith Endowed Chair for Integrity in Business. The gift built upon a family legacy of supporting education at UA that began in 1923 when the family of J. Craig Smith’s grandfather, B.B. Comer, a former governor of Alabama, provided an endowment in his honor to award a medal of excellence in mathematics.

IESR’s programs will include

• Assisting with the development of service-learning courses for academic credit across all academic disciplines
• Implementing a “Moral Forum” University-wide debate competition
• Developing a multi-disciplinary ethics/social responsibility minor
• Incorporating ethical discourse into freshman orientation
• Developing a justice-based anthropological documentary filmmaking/journalism class
• Offering fellowship opportunities
• Sponsoring public lectures
• Providing opportunities for visiting scholars to affiliate with IESR

Black earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 and his law degree from Yale Law School in 1997. Following law school graduation, he joined the Birmingham law firm of Maynard, Cooper and Gale. He spent a year serving as an assistant to the governor in 2000-2001, where he researched policy issues and worked on economic development projects.

He also created Impact: An Alabama Student Service Initiative, the state’s first non-profit organization dedicated to developing and implementing substantive service-learning projects in coordination with select universities and junior colleges throughout the state. For example, under this initiative, since November 2004, more than 200 trained student volunteers representing 10 universities screened more than 4,400 preschool children for vision problems in 24 Alabama counties. Some 600 of these children failed the screenings and are currently receiving free follow-up care.