Decades after earning his high school equivalency diploma at a state prison for young men, Christopher Medina-Kirchner is a teaching fellow and post-doctoral research scientist at Harvard Medical School. 

Medina-Kirchner was the keynote speaker during a ceremony honoring 29 graduates last week, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections announced in a press release on Wednesday. Attending the ceremony was his first visit back to the Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility since his release.

“If you don’t believe that a future is possible, you’re never going to pursue it,” Medina-Kirchner said, according to the DOC. 

Citing his experience in the Ivy League, he told graduates that “I really think that what you did takes more courage.” 

“Getting an education here in prison you have to navigate challenges that most students will never understand,” he said. “You have to stay focused in an environment that makes that difficult.”

The Verge and the Racine County Eye have reported on Medina-Kirchner’s journey, with the Eye reporting that he ended up selling drugs and was in and out of the system from when he was 18 to when he was 25 years old, eventually getting out in 2013. The DOC said that at Harvard, his research involves the effects of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), and he hopes this type of research “can help lead to evidence-based approaches to drug education and public policy.”

Nine of the graduates earned technical certificates in mechatronics from Gateway Technical College. Twenty of them earned a high school equivalency diploma (HSED), and seven of those earned their Multi-Craft Core Curriculum HSED in partnership with the Literacy Services of Wisconsin, which includes a pre-apprenticeship element within the construction building trades. 

After earning his high school equivalency degree at the prison, Medina-Kirchner earned his bachelor’s degree at UW-Milwaukee and doctorate at Columbia University, the DOC said.  

“I hope you never stop believing in yourselves,” he said during his speech. “Your future is not limited by where you started. It’s not limited by your mistakes, by your felony, or what anyone else thinks about you…Your greatest accomplishments likely still lie ahead of you. I want you all to reach for the stars, because I’m standing here proof that sometimes when you reach for one you can actually grab it.”

Staff, teachers and more than 30 family members honored graduates at the ceremony, the DOC said. Medina-Kirchner spoke with graduates individually to offer encouragement and answer questions about the opportunities and challenges graduates will face after release. 

The Racine prison hosts three graduation ceremonies each year to honor student achievements, and 142 incarcerated people graduated from high school or post-secondary programs at the facility during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the DOC said. 

Corrections Secretary Jared Hoy noted that the University of Wisconsin System’s first incarcerated bachelor’s degree recipients since 1975 were recognized last month. 

Hoy said in the press release that “there are a growing number of opportunities available to those in our care, and it’s worth celebrating the men and women who take advantage of them.”

The Atwood Music Hall in Madison was packed Wednesday afternoon, as community members said goodbye to Stuart Dymzarov, the founding principal of Malcolm Shabazz City High School and, for many, many people, a beloved mentor and friend.

Colleagues and former students at Shabazz, the alternative school launched in 1971 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, remembered Stuart’s fierce advocacy for his vision of an open-minded, flexible school. “Education by any means necessary,” was his riff on the famous slogan of the school’s namesake, Malcolm X.

Hearing the eulogies for Stuart, a big bear of a man with a wild beard, radical politics and a radiant warmth, brought back the optimism and high spirits of a generation of Madisonians who protested the war in Vietnam, rejected careerist striving and established their own little cooperative communities in the idealistic belief that they were on the cusp of changing the world for the better. 

One of those starry-eyed idealists was my mother, Dorothy Conniff, who lived in a collective household with Stuart and a dozen other young radicals on Spaight Street on Madison’s East Side. She was in her 20s then and I was just a toddler. “We supported each other’s projects and ideals and had intense discussions about how to change the world,” my mom wrote in the online guest book for Stuart’s memorial. I remember a single check she kept in a scrapbook from the joint household account of those days, with 14 names in the upper lefthand corner — a testament to the trust and cooperation in that happy group. 

Like a lot of young people in the heady 1960s and 1970s in Madison, my mom, Stuart and their whole cohort felt progress over injustice and violence was underway and the world would soon be a brighter place.  “We were optimistic because the antiwar movement had forced Lyndon Johnson out of office,” my mom told me. A lot of former Madison radicals were in the white-haired crowd at the memorial service, including former Mayor Paul Soglin, former Alderman Billy Feitlinger and Jeff Feinblatt, one of the Shabazz teachers who, inspired by Stuart, nurtured and inspired a new generation of young people.

I remember Stuart as a big, benign presence in striped overalls, hoisting the kids in the Spaight Street household on his shoulders and rumbling around the house. Later he became a devoted father to his own three children with his wife of 50 years, Marsha (the two combined their last names, Dym and Zarov) and a beloved uncle, grandfather and father figure to hundreds of Shabazz students. 

Stuart’s nephew Miles Kietzer gave a touching tribute to the uncle who used to pick him up along with his sister after school and take them wherever they wanted to go, buying them treats and letting them fritter away his money on plastic trinkets with an easy-going smile.

Stuart’s brother Harvey described how Stuart would spend endless hours hanging out and having conversations with people, and when Harvey quizzed him on what they had said and what he had learned, he shrugged it off. “I like experiencing people,” he told Harvey. That acceptance and enjoyment of people with no particular goal in mind was classic Stuart.

Stuart was always willing to give people rides, day and night, including, according to one of his younger relatives, on a memorable night when he called Stuart from a biker bar where he was having a drug-induced attack of paranoia. Stuart drove across town in the middle of the night, appeared in the doorway of the bar, a looming presence in a khaki jacket and driving cap, wrapped his younger relative in a hug and took him home.

The feeling of safety and love he gave people is the strongest, lasting impression Stuart left.

He was a fighter — against the “fascist” politics he despised in the U.S. government, even before the current era, and on behalf of people he felt were not given a fair shake. His friends remember his ferociousness on the basketball court, his relentlessness in political arguments, and his tireless, aggressive advocacy at school board meetings and the superintendent’s office on behalf of the staff and students at Shabazz.

But mostly, Stuart made people feel cared for, appreciated, heard. It seems to me that quality is exactly what we need right now, to counter the epic cruelty, hatred and greed that is engulfing our nation and the world.

The sunny optimism of the 1960s counterculture seems far away today. But Stuart’s legacy lives on, not just at the still-thriving alternative high school he founded (where the family encourages people to make a donation to the scholarship program in his name), but also in the light he brought into the world by really seeing other people, accepting and loving them. Experiencing that quality in Stuart in small ways, one on one, is what made such a difference for people. More than any grand political program or analysis, it is a powerful antidote to despair.