Is Harris’ father a ‘Marxist’? Not a chance, says the former dean of the NYU business school

Former President Donald Trump mocked Vice President Kamala Harris during their presidential debate for allegedly “following my philosophy” on U.S. trade with China, saying he wanted to send her a “MAGA hat.” He then called the Democratic candidate a “Marxist.”

“Her father is a Marxist economics professor,” Trump said of Donald Harris, the first black professor in Stanford’s economics department to win tenure. “And he taught her well.”

That’s news to Stanford economist Peter Blair Henry. For the past two decades, he and the elder Harris have worked together to advise the government of Jamaica, their shared homeland, on how to use free markets to tackle poverty and tackle the country’s previously crippling national debt.

Henry, dean emeritus of NYU’s Stern Business School and a board member at Citigroup and Nike, said most would characterize him as a pragmatic center-right economist, or perhaps a so-called “Blue Dog Democrat.”

“Donald Harris is of the same ilk,” he said, at least in terms of their work for the Jamaican government. Harris, who has rarely spoken to the media during his daughter’s political career, did not return a request for comment.

Critics of Donald Harris may point out that his academic work was intensely theoretical and that he criticized mainstream economics of the left. There is also a 48-year-old review in Stanford’s student newspaper describing him as a “Marxist scholar” who was considered by some faculty members to be “too charismatic, a pied piper who steers students away from neoclassical economics.”

However, Harris’s early academic inclinations do not appear to have influenced his work for the Jamaican government later in life. Regardless of which party is in power, Henry said, he and Harris have consistently urged the country’s decision-makers to reduce red tape for entrepreneurs, attract foreign investment, ensure low and stable inflation and reduce the national debt to push back.

“These are constant themes that we both emphasize,” says Henry. “How do you make Jamaica the most business- and family-friendly place in the Caribbean?”

His and Harris’ policy recommendations, he said, reflect what economists have called the Washington Consensus. The term refers to a series of free market reforms that, according to James A. Baker, then Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, developing countries should implement to make themselves creditworthy again.

Those policy standards include an openness to trade. Trump, on the other hand, has proposed a 10% global tariff and a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods. Henry said he believes free trade has been crucial in lifting more than 1 billion people out of poverty since 1990, according to United Nations figures.

“The world is in some sort of danger of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs,” he said.

Some allies believe the elder Harris’s work was instrumental in Jamaica closing a successful deal with the International Monetary Fund and regaining access to international capital markets. A recent article co-authored by Henry examines how the country has reduced its debt from 144% of GDP at the end of 2012 to 72% in 2023.

The country’s recent fiscal discipline has led some to call the island “Caribbean Germany.” Alternatively, Henry sees a path for Jamaica to become the ‘Caribbean Singapore’, a potential transformation made possible by taking advantage of geography and strategic investments in education and infrastructure.

A legacy that starts in Jamaica

However, this broader perspective on the senior Harris’ career did not appear to form the basis for Trump’s comments, as he attempted to portray his opponent as a radical leftist, using what the Washingtonpost called a ‘ridiculous slur’. The vice president’s economic proposals are generally viewed as moderate Democratic ideas, although her call to ban “price gouging of food and groceries” has been widely panned by economists (the AfterThe newspaper’s editors accused her of presenting “populist gimmicks”.

Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate has been endorsed by more than 90 executives from major companies, including the former CEOs of Pepsi, Ford and Yahoo, as well as more than 700 venture capitalists. She was raised primarily by her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who divorced her husband in 1971.

The vice president has strong ties with Jamaica, as does Henry. His parents met at what is now the University of the West Indies, the island’s flagship university, just a few years before the country gained independence from British rule in 1962. His father came from a rural area in the south-west of the island , and , like his future wife, had earned a scholarship to become the first member of his family to attend college. They would both go on to earn their PhDs from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, respectively.

“The campus was teeming with ambitious, smart, hungry young people who wanted to make a difference,” said Henry, the youngest person ever appointed to lead NYU’s business school.

When Henry became a professor at Stanford in the late 1990s, his father did not tell him that his roommate, Donald Harris, who had a similar background in northern Jamaica, was teaching in the same department. Harris eventually made the connection after a faculty member introduced the couple because of their shared interest in economic development.

Born and raised in Jamaica until the age of nine, Henry witnessed what he described as an “economic disaster” on the island in the 1970s. His family emigrated after an ambitious socialist program left the country poorer and heavily in debt.

He recalled being struck by what seemed to him like uniform prosperity when he arrived at his new suburban home in Illinois. That contrast, he said, sparked his interest in economics.

Unfortunately, Henry’s father died shortly after the economist began to collaborate significantly with Harris. However, the work of his son and roommate may well outlive them.

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com