Tom Loftus, assistant professor of business and self-described “pack rat,” admits he has a messy office, but now he has someone to clean it – four Sweet Briar College students, to be exact. “I was determined to get enough people to get my office neat and organized,” Loftus said Tuesday, Oct. 21 at “Cleaning for the Cure,” an event that auctioned off students for cleaning duties.

In all, 17 of the College’s business management lab students went on the auction block for the fundraiser, one of several events the two classes have organized this fall to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure Richmond Affiliate.

It is the first time the management lab has worked with the organization. Past beneficiaries have included Habitat for Humanity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“Partnering with Komen was an idea that Ashleigh Caisse ’10, one of the lab CEO’s, came up with over the summer, and I’ve been very impressed at how the issue has resonated with students both inside and outside the lab,” Loftus said. “The lab students who volunteered to do ‘Cleaning for the Cure’ are really demonstrating to us … their own deep personal commitments to the cause of curing breast cancer.”

For “Cleaning for the Cure,” auctioned students agreed to spend three hours cleaning dorm rooms, College offices or on-campus houses for the winning bidder. Bidding started at $10 and sometimes verged on furious.

Pia Cho, who bid on several students and was auctioned off herself for $21, shouted, “I need someone to do my laundry” when Michelle Anderson ’11 came up for sale. Cho bid $10 and, after a counter bid of $15, won Anderson’s services for $20.

When it was Kristen Anderson’s turn to be auctioned, the sophomore stood patiently on stage as students yelled, “Ten dollars! Fifteen! Twenty! Twenty-five!” The bidding finally stopped at $30.

All told, by the time the last “going, going, gone!” was shouted, a total of $262 was raised for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

While their classmates were being auctioned, another group of business management lab students was selling Halloween-themed “Boo Grams” and pink T-shirts to benefit Susan G. Komen.

Alysha Norbury displays the shirt she designed.Alysha Norbury ’10 designed the shirts, which had pink breast cancer awareness ribbons on the back intertwined to form a heart and the slogan, “Sweet Briar Women Support the Fight.” The group ordered 130 T-shirts and by Tuesday afternoon had sold nearly all of them for $10 each.

“I was really very delighted at both the turnout and the financial results of the ‘Cleaning for the Cure’ event,” Loftus wrote afterward in an e-mail. “Both this event and the T-shirt sales are things we’ve never tried before in the management labs.

“As always, these labs are very exciting (and a little scary) to teach, as I never know at the beginning of the semester what projects the students will decide to undertake.”

Upcoming business management lab events include the “Fund Run” on Sunday, Oct. 26 and “Cooking for the Cure,” a chili cook-off, on Sunday, Nov. 16.