IUP professor working with former Gov. Ridge on Homeland Security book

A political science professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania is collaborating with former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge on a new book on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“The third-largest federal agency was created in 14 months. That’s just a little mentally overwhelming,” Dr. Aleea Lynn Perry told The Penn, IUP’s student newspaper.

Perry said the idea for the book came in the fall of 2017 but that she began working on it in earnest the following year, when she sat down with Ridge during a visit to the Ridge Policy Group in Washington, D.C.

Ridge, governor of Pennsylvania from 1995-2001 and the first Secretary of Homeland Security, has agreed to cooperate with Perry as she researches the book.

“The idea behind the book is to look at it from an organizational perspective,” Perry said. “One of the things that I really enjoyed in my Ph.D. program was learning about organizational change and organizational development.”

Although the book will be academic in nature, it will be written with a general audience in mind, she said.

The Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11 and is the third-largest Cabinet-level agency with more than 240,000 employees. The book will be a comprehensive history of the department and its development.