On the morning of 20-N, the rector of the Polytechnic of Barcelona, Gabriel Ferraté, got up with the news of Franco's death and his first call was to the manager of the university, asking him to put the flag at half mast. He ordered the chief of the janitors to hang a flag that he knew was in the safe. So it was done. Minutes later, Martí Vergés, director of the Calculation Center, called Ferraté: "Are you sure you haven't rushed by proclaiming the Republic?" The flag that was in the safe was one that had been requisitioned some time ago in a demonstration. The manager, who was new, only knew that there was a flag in the box. And the janitor, a former civil guard, steadied himself thinking that times were beginning to change.
This anecdote is part of the documentation and personal papers that Gabriel Ferraté (Reus, 1932), former rector of the UOC and UPC, former general director of Universities and Scientific Policy, and also an industrial engineer, agricultural expert, businessman, inventor and collector, He has just handed over to the archive of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, of which he was the founder and ideologue.
Ferraté once said that there are things that he accumulates and others that he collects, such as the 6,000 books of poetry (which he gave to the UPC) or the collection of frogs that he started because the song of those amphibians reminded him of the acronym for the UOC (the ceded to the Museu del Joguet in Figueres). They're all inventoried on his computer. There are, for example, the leaflets that he collected from the university floor or the telexes that the police or rectors from all over Spain sent him when he was general director during the transition. In one of these, the rector of the Complutense Ángel González Álvarez asked him what to do with a banner that read: "The whores are in power because their children already are." In another, the rector of Zaragoza spoke of graffiti "with anti-everything phrases signed by an anarchist group from the closed in a circle." One of the conflicts as general director had it as a result of a Llach recital in Tenerife that was prohibited by the Minister of the Interior. Faced with the protests of the university students, the ministry justified itself with this note: "We do not prohibit Lluís Llach's recital, but we warn that the public force would enter if it were held."
The historian and professor Jaume Claret, at the award ceremony held at the UOC's Can Jaumandreu complex, pointed out that an archive "is the memory of a career". He also joked about the anecdote of the flag, pointing out that he had believed that it was part of the legends about the former rector, but that he was able to verify its veracity in a newspaper of the time, El Correo Catalán. Montse Clèries, director of the UOC's Servei d'Arxius, Documentary and Registry Management, explained that all the documents will first be ordered and then a catalog will be drawn up and digitization will begin.
Ferraté's 50 linear meters of documents, which also include numerous correspondence, are also a history of the transition and evolution of the Catalan university system, with special reference to the consolidation process of the UPC and the creation of the UOC -a commission that he received from President Pujol and Minister Laporta.
As the rector of the UOC, Josep A. Planell, who after ten years in office is waiting for his successor to be named, recalled, “we need collective memory to substantiate the past”. Ferraté himself closed the event to point out with a certain irony that "time runs faster and faster" and that perhaps for this reason "humans like to think about the past".
