Harris attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. He later earned a master's degree in linguistics from Louisiana State University and a PhD in linguistics from MIT. Harris joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. During his tenure, he served as head of what was then called the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. 'I met Jim when I came to MIT in 1977 as department head of the neonatal Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,' says Samuel Jay Keyser, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics. 'Throughout his career in the department, he never relinquished his connection to the unit that first employed him at MIT.' In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite 'languages of science and world literature,' Harris championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish...
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