Courtesy Georgetown University

Next week in Philadelphia I’m hosting an event called “A More Perfect Union: A Dialogue on American Values.” It’s the first in a series from the Ford Foundation and Georgetown University. During this one we’ll be exploring how our values play into decisions about the national budget.

CLICK HERE for more information on the event.

As I mentioned yesterday there will be 10 participants, and prior to the event we asked them to respond to three questions:

1. Do you believe Americans hold a set of shared values, such as freedom, equality and community? What are some other important values in public life? 2. In your view, has identification with shared American values grown stronger or weaker over the past decade? 3. Which values do you think should guide decisions about our national budget?

Yesterday I posted Carly Fiorina’s response.  And here’s what Georgetown President John DeGioia had to say:

“Our work at Georgetown University is guided by a tradition built upon shared values.  This tradition is informed by our identity as the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university – founded in 1789 – and as a distinctly American place of higher learning, located in the nation’s capital and engaged in the most pressing issues of the day.  These characteristics have directly informed the unique and enduring values of our community: academic excellence; care for the whole person; a commitment to service; respect for difference; and the pursuit of our very best selves, in service of the greater glory of God.

Yet there remains a fundamental resonance between what we do at Georgetown, and the characteristic spirit of all institutions of higher learning, which is to seek the betterment of humankind.  Each of us who has been privileged to pursue post-secondary education in America has experienced this spirit in some capacity; and, as a result, we also have been exposed to certain organizing values – freedom, democracy, dialogue, civility, community, and the pursuit of becoming our very best selves – that influence our responses to issues both complex and mundane.

As higher learning becomes increasingly important to ensure the continued competitiveness of our nation, so, too, will these shared values and ideals, upon which our country and our educational system have been founded.  Our role as educators must be to provide our young women and men with the resources to develop their promise within the context of these ideals, both as a way of shaping the next generation of leaders for our nation, and of tempering the coarseness and intensified polarization that have emerged within the first decade of this new century.”

Please continue to check back here as we post more of the participants’ thoughts leading up to the Oct. 11th event. And weigh in below on how you would answer those three questions.

– George Stephanopoulos