A conversation with Michael A. Nutter
David N. Dinkins Professor of Professional Practice in Urban and Public Affairs, SIPA
Former Mayor of the City of Philadelphia
Host: A’Lelia Bundles
AB Harvard, ’76JRN, Columbia University Trustee and Vice Chair

Co-Sponsored by CAA Boston, Columbia Alumni Association, ColumbiaDC, and Columbia University Club of Philadelphia 

Four years ago, when Prof. Nutter pleaded for action with those words in response to the protests for the Black men killed by the Police and the subsequent revenge killing of 5 Dallas Police officers, he had just finished his successful eight-year tenure as the ninety-eighth mayor of his hometown of Philadelphia. Under his watch, homicides were at an almost fifty-year low and Philadelphia’s population grew every year, including the largest percentage of millennial population growth in the nation.

Nutter had the premonition that America was "experiencing trauma, despair and social disengagement in many communities, whether because of the effects of violence, a broken criminal justice system, deteriorating racial/social relationships and a fraying of the fragile fragments of relationships that determine “chaos or community”, and that the lasting change requires long-term commitment and collaboration across organizations from municipal to federal jurisdictions. Since then, in the absence of coherent guidance from the federal side, the role of municipal leaders has become even more critical.