A Scholar of English, Greek, and Peace

English Professor Peter Bien finds comfort in students such as Ann-Forbes whose lifestyles help them seek answers to moral and spiritual dilemmas. He feels that too few students resist predictable careers, which they enter all too often owing not to a true sense of vocation but to spiritual emptiness. When he recently asked his English 2 class, "What is your goal in life? What do you believe in? What is going to motivate you when you leave college?", he reports that there wasn't a single student who had anything to say.

His interestin service careers for students derives from his own experiences in Quaker weekend workcamps during his undergraduate years, followed by relief work in Holland after the Second World War and co-leadership of summer workcamps in the slums of Rochester, New York. At Dartmouth he has encouraged students' participation in the international workcamp movement and has been one of the coordinators of the War/Peace Studies Program. Established in 1984 by Elise Boulding, this program now offers two courses to undergraduates as well as a university seminar to faculty.

Ironically, most of Bien's scholarship has concentrated on a man who was more or less an advocate of war, the twentieth-century Greek author

Nikos Kazantzakis. Bien's involvement with Kazantzakis began in 1959 when he translated The LastTemptation of Christ. He followed this with translations of Kazantzakis's SaintFrancis and the autobiographical war novel Life in the Tomb by Stratis Myrivilis. Bien has published critical studies of Kazantzalris's work and has just completed the first volume of a biography, Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, which sees Kazantzakis's politica! involvements as more religious than political.

At Dartmouth, Bien's other accomplishments include the establishment of the Composition Center in 1975 as pan of his tenure as the "led and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities. With his wife, Chrysanthi Bien, and Professor John Rassias, Bien has also published several textbooks that apply the Rassias Method of language instruction to modern Greek.

Peter Bien