CSR Rubric

In the Spring Semester of 2019, USF’s School of Management offered for the first time as part of its MBA curriculum a course in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This elective was also unique in that it was co-taught by a Professor of Ethics and the President of the University, Paul Fitzgerald, SJ. The course was designed around understanding and refining the concept of CSR by researching best practices, available standards for generating and evaluating criteria, applying moral theory, and identifying subjects for exemplary case studies on CSR. As the course progressed, students became less interested in preparing case studies and more interested in refining the standards by which they recognize and measure CSR practices. So rather than work individually or in pairs on developing case studies, the students collaborated on developing a tool, which turned out to be a rubric, by which to measure an organization’s performance by CSR standards-- including Ignatian standards--that they deemed appropriate for the recognition. A small class of 12 students, they naturally broke in to pairs based on specific interests and competencies like finance, human resources, supply chain and so forth. The students critiqued and improved the contributions of each pair and all participated in creating the Ignatian categories.