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At a campus wide program at Pacific Union College May 3, Sister Helen Prejean, the noted social activist and author of Dead Man Walking, called for the end of the death penalty and a shift in focus from retributive to redemptive justice. Prejean’s appearance in the Napa Valley comes less than two weeks after an initiative to end the death penalty in California qualified to appear on the ballot in the upcoming November election. “The Supreme Court says that the death penalty should only be reserved for the worst of the worst murder cases—but how in the Sam Hill do we know which is the worst of the worst?” said the Louisiana-born nun who was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in a 1995 film based on her book. “Every murder is the worst of the worst…we don’t even know how to apply the standards.” A nun in the Congregation of St. Joseph, Prejean called attention to what she sees as an extreme paradox—the religious justification for executing criminals and the merciful figure of Jesus Christ found in the Bible. “We have gotten ourselves to a point in this country where we try to make violence redemptive,” she said. “Nothing could be...

Pacific Union College celebrated its annual Green Week, focusing on sustainable living in all aspects of life through a full week of programming, April 15-20. This is the fifth year of the event—a partnership between the PUC Green Club and the office of student services. The week features events designed to help the campus community shift to more sustainable practices. The week was scheduled to lead up to worldwide celebrations of Earth Day 2012 on April 22. “Earth Day is an international event to promote safeguarding the environment,” explains Darlene Teddy, president of the PUC Green Club and a junior environmental studies student. “Green Week is PUC’s way of being involved; we use the week to educate students about being green and to be aware of the environment. It's all about education and awareness.” Themes were planned for each day promoting sustainability. On Monday, hundreds of students across campus wore green to celebrate the kickoff of Green Week. The next day, students were encouraged to unplug unused chargers and turnoff light switches for "Turn-off Tuesday." The club also used silk-screen printing to create free reusable tote bags imprinted with “Going Green—Pacific Union College,” as an effort to reduce plastic waste....

Pacific Union College is unveiling two new academic programs available for students in the 2012-2013 school year. In the fall, the department of visual arts will begin offering aspiring artists a new bachelor of fine arts while the department of mathematics is spearheading a new interdisciplinary biomathematics major for students interested in both mathematics and biology. PUC’s new bachelor of fine arts (BFA) program offers a professional degree with a unique combination of graphic design, fine art, photography, and film and television production in a comprehensive BFA degree. “We’re all really excited about the program,” says Milbert Mariano, chair of the department of visual arts. “It’s a more professional degree that prepares students to either go on to graduate school or be a professional in those areas due to the intensity of the program.” The BFA curriculum will be more focused on core visual arts classes than those of the BA and BS programs offered by the department. To facilitate the larger focus on departmental classes, students in the program will have a reduced general education requirement. BFA-track students will focus about 20 percent of their classes on art history or art criticism to gain a greater depth of knowledge...

Award winning TV journalist Christof Putzel will speak at Pacific Union College’s Communication Honor Society Symposium on Friday, May 4, at 12 p.m. in Scales Chapel. Putzel will discuss his journey as a reporter, share some of the most intriguing stories from the front lines, and field questions during a Q & A segment. Admission is free. The symposium will begin with an episode screening of Vanguard, a documentary series highlighting global and social issues. Vanguard is one of the top shows on Current TV—a progressive television network co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt in 2005. Putzel, one of the show’s three correspondents, serves as a guide who takes viewers on a journey into some of the most dangerous parts of the world. Vanguard’s current season features Putzel investigating drug cartels in Mexico, the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, and the famous “Smoking Baby” in Indonesia. A third-generation news reporter, Putzel has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and won an Alfred I. duPont Award, a Livingston Award, a National Headliner Awards and two Webby Awards. His work has appeared on ABC’s Nightline, Good Morning America, CBC, and the Sundance Channel. “We’re thrilled about the opportunity to...

Vola Andrianarijaona, a professor of physics at Pacific Union College and a winner of a grant from the National Science Foundation, recently returned from a research trip to Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the world’s top experimental physics laboratories. His subject: charge transfer of astroparticles, a largely unexplored area of physics with a broad range of both theoretical and practical applications. “I chose to focus on these particles because no one else is doing them, because they’re too difficult,” says Andrianarijaona. That’s no idle boast. The particles within the scope of Vola’s research—specifically ion-neutral molecular hydrogen—simply do not exist in Earth’s normal environment, and only occur naturally in the near-vacuum of space and the extreme upper atmosphere. The resources to simulate the conditions required in Andrianarijaona’s research exist in only a handful of facilities in the world—including Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; and the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. The physicist has spent much of the last few months gravitating between those facilities, pushing forward on cutting edge experiments. Several of the techniques he is using are so revolutionary that they don’t even have a name, including one apparatus in Belgium that he himself designed and...