A former participant in Tufts University’s prison education program in Massachusetts allegedly opened fire off campus in May, critically injuring two people. In the months since, Tufts has paused the program’s reentry services, frozen its bachelor’s degree pathway for currently incarcerated students, and moved its founding director into an advisory role.
The reentry program was a launch pad for people coming home from prison — housing, employment and financial support alongside college coursework. Now it’s on hold, and students still inside are left uncertain whether the years they’ve spent working toward a Tufts degree will lead anywhere.
It’s forced the university to weigh one person’s actions against a program that exists, in part, to reduce the odds of the very outcome that just occurred. It also raises a broader question about how easily a long-standing prison education program can be upended.
How universities respond to crisis
Experts on prison education and student conduct say violent events like this one are extremely rare — and that institutions under pressure to respond often make decisions driven by fear.
When a crisis hits a campus, the response typically unfolds in two stages, said Brian Glick, a member of the Association for Student Conduct Administration’s Public Policy and Legislative Issues Committee who has worked in student conduct for almost two decades. The first is the immediate response, which can look different depending on whether the incident happens on campus or off. The second comes later, once things have calmed down: an after-action review, asking what happened and what, if anything, should change.
“What changes do we need to make?” Glick said. “That often leads to a larger discussion of: do we need to make changes structurally to the program?”
That discussion can turn into something broader — not just what went wrong, but whether the program itself is still worth having. “Is this going to continue to work for us?” is the question institutions ask themselves, he said. There are a lot of different lenses to look through: financial, reputational, or simply whether a program still serves enough people to justify its cost.
Institutions responding to a crisis often act quickly, under pressure from students, parents and the broader public to be seen doing something. “A lot of people don’t know what to do and how to address it,” said Ved Price, executive director of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison.
These incidents are tragic and sad, and there should be room for people to grieve, he said, but grief and shock can overshadow everything else.
“What can happen sometimes is that people draw an association: this student was formerly incarcerated, and he went through this program, therefore we should get rid of the program,” he said. ”So the first thing we do is just punish everybody and get rid of everything, to make people feel like it could never happen again.”
Rob Stewart, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, studies criminal-history disclosure in college admissions. “There’s a lot of really bad criminal justice policy that’s been created in reaction to a single incident,” he said. His own research has found no evidence that screening people by criminal history predicts who will commit crimes on campus.
Violence isn’t unique to people with criminal records, Stewart and Price both said. It can happen “by somebody who’s gone to Ivy League schools and has a PhD and has never been arrested,” Price said, just as easily as by someone who’s been incarcerated.
On the other hand, studies show that participating in education in prison can reduce the likelihood that someone will go back to prison upon release.
What happened
Tyler Brown, the man accused in the shooting, is a former participant in the Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College (TUPIT). He was indicted on over 40 charges, and pleaded not guilty in September. According to police reports, he fired over 70 rounds on Memorial Drive in Cambridge before he was shot by a Massachusetts State Police trooper. He had reportedly been released from a psychiatric hospital three days before the shooting, and prosecutors said he made statements to his parole officer suggesting a mental health crisis in the hours before.
At the time of the shooting, Brown was on parole after serving a sentence for shooting at Boston police officers in 2020. He had participated in Tufts’ bachelor’s degree program while incarcerated. After his 2025 parole, he continued in MyTERN, the college’s reentry program, until he stopped attending in February, according to reporting by the Tufts Daily.
Tufts has laid out its response in a series of provost’s office updates: an independent review of the prison initiative, a faculty and staff working group to weigh its findings, and changes to the program’s leadership. Interim Provost Joseph Auner is overseeing the review.
Patrick Collins, Tufts’ executive director of media relations, wrote in an email to Open Campus that the university is committed to a thorough review and will take the time needed to do so properly. He said the university understands the need to provide ongoing assistance to people reentering school or the workforce and is “working to connect them with partners and other sources of support.”
Sixty incarcerated students are currently taking classes inside and courses are continuing this fall, according to Collins. A representative of Bunker Hill Community College, which partners with Tufts to offer the first two years of the program, said 11 students graduated in June with an associate’s degree. Bunker Hill confirmed that it is continuing to offer classes inside this fall.
The impact on students
One of the recent Bunker Hill graduates was Shawn Shea. He was released in July after serving more than 19 years in prison, he said.
Before his release, Shea asked the parole board to stay in prison an extra year so he could finish his associate’s degree in time to come home and go straight into Tuft’s reentry program, then finish his bachelor’s. Now that plan is on hold, while he applies to other Boston-area colleges, some of which have their own prison education programs.
“What is going on is extremely horrible,” Shea said. “It’s really harming not only the people that are inside trying to get their degrees and better their lives, but also the (formerly incarcerated) people outside.”
Shea said no one from the program has reached out to him or connected him with any resources. He was able to get his transcript from Tufts, after contacting the school himself, so he could apply elsewhere.
Shea said the program inside brought him into regular contact with traditional Tufts students, some of whom worked with him as teaching assistants when he was still incarcerated. That strong connection between incarcerated and traditional students is part of why the program’s suspension has drawn public pushback on campus. Students and faculty held a speak-out on the first day of classes in September. The Tufts Daily student newspaper has continued to report on students and alumni working to maintain community around the program as its future remains unclear.
A renewed focus on reentry
In the last several years, reentry has become an area of focus for colleges with prison education programs. Beyond helping students navigate higher education, reentry programs often provide or connect students with other resources such as housing and financial literacy classes.
After nearly 20 years inside, Nathan Miksch became the first formerly incarcerated TUPIT participant to graduate on Tufts’ Boston campus in 2025. Miksch said MyTERN filled gaps he didn’t know how to fill himself. “I had no credit score,” he said. “They set me up with a financial advisor who helped me establish credit. They helped me learn computers … They helped me with everything that I needed.”
For Miksch, the university’s response puts an impossible standard on everyone who’s come through the program. “I don’t understand how they can logically believe that every student who’s ever a part of this program can never get in trouble, can never ever reoffend, can never ever have mental health issues or substance use issues,” he said.
Miksch said the students affected by the current pause had nothing to do with what happened in May. “It was an incident off campus with someone who was no longer involved in the program,” he said.
The program was open not just to people who came through Tufts’ own in-prison courses, but to any formerly incarcerated person with a high school diploma or its equivalent. Alumni of prison education programs in the Boston area often turned to Tufts.
Now, it’s Tufts students who are looking to other colleges. The Emerson Prison Initiative began as a credit-bearing program in 2017. What started as a pathway for a handful of students to continue their degrees on Emerson’s campus grew into wellness workshops, financial aid support and reentry grants through the Reentry and College Outside Program. In recent months, Emerson has started to welcome students connected to other schools to their reentry workshops, including a recent financial literacy course that drew five participants with ties to Tufts.
“At the end of the day, reentry is critical,,” said Mneesha Gellman, a political science professor who directs Emerson’s program. “If a college is going to maintain a program inside, they ideally should have some kind of outside program to support reentry.”
In the absence of clear guidance from Tufts, some of the work of supporting displaced students has fallen to alumni themselves. “I think all of us are thinking right now about what we can create… in order to fill this gap,” Miksch said. “If Tufts isn’t going to fulfill the promise of MyTERN and TUPIT, then we have to find a way around that.”