He came to the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student in 1961. There, he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian student his age, who holds a Ph.D. follow. in nutrition and endocrinology.
Mrs Harris, her eldest daughter, wrote that the two ‘fell in love with Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement,’ and described learning about protests from a ‘strollers view’. When the children were very young, Dr. Harris attended a series of teaching assignments at colleges in Illinois and Wisconsin, causing the family to relocate several times. The couple divorced in 1969, when Mrs. Harris was five, and divorced two years later.
In “The Truths We Hold,” her 2018 memoir, Mrs. Harris wrote that “if they were a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was the first friend. of my mother. ”
The divorce was bitter. Mrs. Harris reminds her to invite both parents to her high school graduation, “even though I knew they would not talk to each other,” and was afraid at first that her mother would not show up. (She did so in a “very bright red dress and heels,” wrote Mrs. Harris.)
Dr. Harris, in his 2018 essay, said his early, close contact with his daughters “came to an abrupt halt” after a controversial victim. He said the divorce settlement “was based on the California State’s false assumption that fathers could not have parents (especially in the case of this father, ‘a nephew from da eyelans’, was the stereotype of Yankee, who’ maybe he just ate his kids for breakfast!) Still, I persisted, never giving up my love for my kids. ”
This friction slowed down the professional rise of Dr. Harris did not, and he first served at the University of Wisconsin and then at Stanford University. Dr. Harris’s 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Distribution of Income,” is dedicated “to Kamala and Maya.”
His work was closely followed in Jamaica, said Renee Anne Shirley, who was an adviser to the Prime Minister of Jamaica in the early 2000s, a period when Dr. Harris served as economic adviser to the government.
