In a full house of 300 guests and residents, San Quentin’s Mount Tamalpais College, known locally as MTC, celebrated its 2026 commencement at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center’s Chapel B on June 12.
Graduates Evan Richard Aguilar, Keith R. Carter, Armenia Cudjo, Bobby Lewis Moody, Michael Nickerson, Lionel Scott, and Tu Anh Tran received Associate of Arts degrees in Liberal Arts.
“Please move your tassels to the left,” said Dr. Amy Jamgochian, the college’s Chief Academic Officer. “Families, friends, faculty, staff, and members of our board, I present to you the Class of 2026. You are now graduates of Mount Tamalpais College.”
Graduate Armenia Cudjo, 69, a former Death Row resident, had already received his degree from MTC’s predecessor, Patten University / Prison University Project in 2002.
He said he never had a chance to participate in a ceremony, because “Death Row prisoners were not allowed to participate in any graduation ceremonies.”
A 2022 resentencing reduced his sentence to 25 years to life and made him eligible to return to San Quentin, but in general population.
Valedictorian Evan Richard Aguilar, 58, did not graduate from high school.
“I had been a rebellious youth,” Aguilar said.
He said he had tried various avenues of higher education, but nothing worked until he started at MTC. He graduated with a 3.79 GPA. Aguilar has a determinate release date in 2034 that he has reduced by six years to 2028, largely with time credits earned from his participation in education.
Keynote speaker Henry Frank gave a speech about his personal journey to education.
“Prison is changing slowly, but it is changing,” said Frank, who graduated from MTC in 2007.
He said MTC let him imagine a life outside the walls. Since his release, Frank worked as an advocate, teaching artist, and Communications Director at William James Association, a nonprofit organization that brings arts programming to incarcerated communities.
Mount Tamalpais College, the only private college inside the CDCR, established a practice of recruiting volunteer faculty from academic institutions like Berkeley and Stanford and conducting classes at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center’s newly constructed Learning Center.
