Fox News

Following Harris rising to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket and formally accepting the party’s nomination last week, Fox News Digital examined her father’s background and legacy within academia.

Donald J. Harris, who coincidentally shares the same first name as VP Harris' Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, is a retired Stanford University professor of economics, whose econ background is steeped in Marxist theory, which earned him the description from the Economist last month as a "combative Marxist economist."

"??He is a clear writer. There are few compound nouns or sentences that run for paragraphs. Yet he is still a Marxist and his writings are sprinkled with obscurantist theorising. Republicans who have mocked Ms. Harris for word-salad speeches will find precedent in her father’s writing," the Economist wrote of Harris’ father.

The Stanford Daily, the elite university’s student newspaper, described Donald Harris as teaching "radical political economics" and as a "Marxian economist" in 1974. He notably became the first Black scholar to receive tenure within Stanford’s economic school.

He retired from teaching in 1998 "in order to pursue more actively and practically his long-standing interest, which originally motivated him to take up the study of economics, in developing public policies to promote economic growth, unleash productive capabilities, and advance social equity," according to his Stanford biography. He has since served as an expert on how to inspire economic growth for his home country of Jamaica, the Washington Post previously reported.