Looking back on two decades at the University of Oregon, professor Deanna Campbell Robinson said give-and-take learning with students most enriched her professional life.

Robinson retired at the end of the 1998 winter term. She will continue to teach up to two classes a year for the next five years under the University's early retirement program. "The rewards of education lie more in the intellectual and personal exchanges among people rather than mastery of any body of knowledge," said Robinson, who specialized in telecommunications research and international communication. "I find now that the students that I advised are by far the most meaningful aspect of my working life. The old hackneyed expression is true: they taught me far more than I could give them."

Rather than have a retirement party, Robinson asked that money for a party instead be used to help send three doctoral students to an international conference, the International Association for Mass Communication Research in Glasgow, Scotland, where they will present papers in July.

Robinson began her career at UO in 1978 in the Speech Department as the first woman in the Telecommunication and Film program. She was the Speech Department's graduate director for 13 years. She joined the School in 1992 when the Speech Department was closed.

Her many books and book-length studies, written alone or with others, include two books, Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity, and A Telecommunications Manual for Special Education Needs in Remote and Rural Areas. She is working on three books, including, Universal Service in the Age of Competition and Tidal Wave: The Process of Informatization.

Robinson's major research grants have come from such entities as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NASA, U.S. Department of Education, UNESCO, German Democratic Republic and the Smithsonian Institution.

However, she says her most important accomplishments are the "students and colleagues who remain my closest friends and who live all over the world--for me, the essence of globalization and my own life."

Robinson earned a bachelor's in English in 1964, a master's in telecommunication and film in '72, and a doctorate in telecommunication and film in '74--all from UO. She taught high school English before pursuing advanced degrees. She began a university career in '74 as an assistant communication professor at Ohio State University. Like countless women, Robinson experienced the resistance to women entering the predominantly male academic world and the tension between raising a family and pursuing a career. It was the personal hardship of moving to Ohio for two years while her family stayed in Oregon.

"Getting my degrees was partly a way of doing something interesting while raising young children. Gradually, however, the faith that faculty members put in me and the responsibility of using an NDEA (National Defense Education Act) fellowship changed the way I felt about my future," she said.

Summing up the richness she has found in life as a teacher and researcher, Robinson conjured up an image from the Fellini movie "8 1/2" "where all the people who have made up his life (and, hence, his films) parade through a set holding hands in a long human chain. The educational process is that chain," she said.