Gary Lemon Celebrates 50 Years of Relationships and Impact

A lot has changed since Gary Lemon arrived at DePauw University.

"There were no computers," he recalls. "There was no word processing. You had to actually write out things or use a typewriter. And if you wanted to make a duplicate, there was an old mimeograph machine you had to crank."

Five decades later, his students are no longer cranking machines. They're talking to machines - and the machines are talking back. "What's happening now is AI," says Lemon. "I teach senior seminar, and the students there have to write papers. The question now is: What function does AI have in that process? Do we have to change what we're doing because of it?"

These are questions the rural Kansas native couldn't have envisioned when he first arrived in Greencastle in 1976. Growing up on a farm that had originally belonged to his great-great-grandfather, Lemon realized at an early age that he wasn't cut out to be a farmer. ("Too much work," he jokes.) Instead, he chose to do what he loved most: go to school.

Fresh off his graduate studies at the University of Kansas, Lemon initially turned down the job offer he'd received from Jerry Warren, chair of DePauw's economics department at the time. "I told him, 'Sorry, it doesn't look like it's going to work.' Jerry asked what it would have taken for me to say yes, so I mentioned a few things and assumed that was that. But about 48 hours later he called back and said, 'Oh, by the way, we're going to give you exactly what you want.'"

Since then, Lemon has been a fixture on DePauw's campus and a pivotal part of many students' lives. Whether it has been through his work in teaching economics or through his stint at the helm of the Management Fellows program, his objective has remained the same: to give his students a practical, well-rounded foundation that can translate to success in any field they choose to pursue.

"I'm a big believer in the liberal arts," he says. "I'm not so naïve to think that my theories or the theories of economists are the most important things I teach in class. I want my students to learn how to think. I give them a problem, and I give them tools to take that problem apart. And 20 or 30 years from now, when another problem comes across their desk, they'll say, 'I've never seen this before. But I know how to think and I know how to use my tools. I can take this apart and come to a reasonable solution.'"