Former Pennsylvania Governor and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge will present the annual Grove City College Pew Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. Oct. 8 in Ketler Auditorium of the Pew Fine Arts Center on campus. The title of his presentation, which is free and open to the public, is “Security and the Future."

The annual Pew Memorial Lecture was established in honor and memory of J. Howard Pew, a revered Christian layman, renowned industrialist and College benefactor. A graduate of the Class of 1900, Pew was a member of the Grove City College Board of Trustees from 1912-1971 and served as President of the Board of Trustees for the last 40 of those years. The Pew Memorial Lecture is funded through the generosity of alumni gifts. Its purpose is to bring to campus lecturers who share Pew’s love of freedom, which he believed to be an outgrowth of Christian faith.

A native of western Pennsylvania, Ridge served six terms in Congress beginning in 1982 and was the first enlisted Vietnam combat veteran elected to the U.S. House. He was governor from 1995 to 2001, earning recognition for technology, education, environmental and health care initiatives and aggressive tax reforms.

Following Sept. 11, he was appointed the first Office of Homeland Security Advisor, and in 2003, took over as the first Secretary of Homeland Security, a position he held until 2005. He now serves as a consultant and sits on the boards of such businesses as Home Depot and Savi Technology, an international technology provider. Most recently, he was appointed senior adviser to the government of Albania and is a member of the Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel, a group prescribed by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine following the April 16 shootings at the Blacksburg campus.

Ridge is a graduate of Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

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