Gopalan and Donald Harris’s marriage began to fall apart as their careers took off, with Kamala Harris eventually writing in her memoir that her parents “stopped being kind to one another” by the time she was just 5 years old. Gopalan and her daughters moved with Donald Harris to the Midwest when he scored limited professorship stints at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and then at Northwestern University, but Gopalan moved with her daughters back to the Bay Area in 1970 while Donald Harris was working a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin. Right when Donald Harris returned to the Bay Area to join the University of Stanford’s economics department in 1972, Gopalan filed for divorce.
Office of Strategic Communication