Conrad Fink, who taught a generation of journalists at the University of Georgia after a career as a foreign correspondent and executive for The Associated Press, died Saturday at age 80.

Fink had been battling prostate cancer that had returned two decades after successful surgery and was admitted to a local hospital for treatment last week, said E. Culpepper Clark, dean of the university’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“He was fighting it manfully, but it got him,” Clark said.

Fink had taught as a journalism professor since 1983 at UGA, where students either feared or revered him for his gruff persona and merciless editing of their class assignments and published news stories.

His approach to teaching resembled that of a newsroom editor more than an academic, drawing on Fink’s 20 years of experience with The AP. In a career that spanned 1957 to 1977, he had served as a night editor in Chicago, a foreign correspondent and as an AP vice president in New York. News assignments overseas took him to India and Vietnam, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

“He would say, ‘Each year thousands of students come to the University of Georgia, and I try to save a few,”’ said Les Simpson, publisher of the Amarillo Globe- News in Texas and a student of Fink’s in the 1980s.