How did Zellig S. Harris influence Noam Chomsky’s academic career?

Zellig S. Harris played a pivotal role in shaping Noam Chomsky’s academic career, primarily by persuading him to remain at the University of Pennsylvania when Chomsky was considering leaving to pursue political interests on a kibbutz.1

Harris, a founder of structural linguistics, shared similar political convictions with Chomsky, which helped forge their connection. Under Harris’s mentorship, Chomsky took graduate courses and, at Harris’s recommendation, expanded his studies to include philosophy and mathematics.1

While Chomsky initially adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to language, he eventually diverged from his teacher’s methods. Harris viewed linguistics as the taxonomic classification of data, whereas Chomsky moved toward a "mentalistic" theory focused on innate principles and the creative nature of language. Although both scholars developed versions of transformational grammar in the 1950s, they did so for different purposes; Harris used transformations to relate surface structures, while Chomsky utilized them to map deep structures to surface structures.213