Michael Nutter is our mayor.

Yesterday, in front of 1,500 people in the Academy of Music, Nutter gave a 40-minute inauguration speech that mirrored his campaign of hope and change.

He predicted “the greatest American city turnaround that anyone has seen in the past 50 years.”

Temple was mentioned just once in his 2,500 word inauguration address, in Nutter’s farewell to outgoing Mayor John F. Street, wishing him luck in “his new career at Temple University.” However, Nutter did make one of his specific goals to increase college educated city residents.

Street, who will become an adjunct professor at Temple this spring semester, was in attendance, in addition to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, W. Wilson Goode Sr. and William J. Green, all city mayors 

“We need to send an unmistakable message to the small minority who are holding the rest of us hostage,” he said. “You will no longer terrorize our neighborhoods. No longer will you hold us hostage in our own city.”

He is the thirty-third man to serve since the 1854 consolidation of Philadelphia County. Since Goode, Sr. came to Room 215 of City Hall in 1984, three of the last four mayors of the city have been black.

Nutter set three specific goals for his administration. Reducing the city’s homicide rate by 30 percent to 50 percent over the next three to five years, closer to 200 murders a year instead of the 392 recorded in 2007, according to the Inquirer. He called to double the number of city residents with college degrees. Philly is just 92 of the nation’s 100 largest cities for its population of college-education residents, with only 18 percent of its adult residents holding four-year bachelor’s degrees. Thirdly, he calls to drastically reduce the city’s 45 percent high school dropout rate over the next five to seven years.
“We can do that, we must do that,” Nutter exhorted. “…We must give our young people the opportunity to grow and develop and be successful.”