Roger Garrison: Pioneer of Digital Pedagogy at the Dawn of the Internet Age

[This tribute to the late Roger W. Garrison (1944–2026) was delivered at the opening reception of the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC) in Auburn, Alabama on March 19, 2026.]

I’d like to let everyone gathered here tonight know that I talked to Jimmy Garrison (Roger’s son) on Monday—the first time I’d met him he was all of seven years old in Roger’s office when I was Roger’s graduate assistant in 1999—but he wants to send his enthusiastic thanks and gratitude for our remembrance of his father and mother. As some of you may or may not know, Karen (Roger’s wife), passed away more than a week ago. This—along with the fact that he’s in California and just had his first child—has really complicated Jimmy’s life in the short term. However, he assured me that he intends to get back this way as soon as he can so that proper and official memorials for both Roger and Karen can be held, and we hope with the participation of the Institute.

Again, I became Roger’s graduate assistant in January 1999. I first sat in his class to repair some of the confusion foisted on me by a Keynesian at the University of Alabama and started helping him pass out class materials and proctoring exams after the student originally assigned to him as his graduate assistant never showed up. He had a class of over 100 students and the World Wide Web had exploded just four years before that in 1995, so he wanted to move his course and course materials into the Internet age and I think our collaboration did that.

First, we transferred his large gradebook from paper (in those days it was a wide green-and-white-striped, continuous-form paper with round holes on each side that came from the registrar’s office) into Microsoft Excel, which sounds absolutely trivial today but certainly wasn’t in the world of Windows ’98.

Photoshop was still mostly a tool for professional graphic designers, so we started with Microsoft Paint, bmp (bitmap) and jpg files, PowerPoint, HTML, and FTP, and gradually built the foundation of the website that’s still on Auburn University’s server.

Roger was the first professor in the department to post grades online. A student could take an exam on a Friday, go back home to Atlanta or Birmingham for the weekend, get on the World Wide Web on Saturday afternoon, and view the score that he or she made on the economics exam taken the day before. This sounds utterly trivial in today’s world of Blackboard and Canvas, but at the time was revolutionary.

Roger was about three quarters done with his magnum opus Time and Money, and I was very privileged to get to read some of his earliest manuscripts. The book was published on October 19, 2000 by Routledge (Wikipedia is wrong that it was 2001, although it’s correct about Roger winning the Vernon Smith Prize that year).

It was a testimony to Roger’s brilliance and experience in electrical engineering that, at age 55, he picked up digital imaging, HTML, and the web so quickly. Of everyone I worked for, he was the most fun to hang out with and was genuinely grateful to those who worked for him. To quote William Anderson, who just happens to be here tonight, “University faculty can be mostly divided up into two categories: scholars and schemers.” Roger was a first-class scholar all the way, but more importantly, a wonderful human being and indisputably the best person I ever collaborated with.