At the end of 1993, the Minister of Universities Josep Laporte asked Gabriel Ferraté to create a Catalan distance university. Ferraté was ending his term as rector of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), after twenty years in office, and he did not hesitate for a moment, but he set his conditions. He has full freedom to guide the project and a flexible structure, without the rigidity of face-to-face universities. This is how he became the first rector of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), a position he held for nine years, until it became a reference center.
These three decades as rector of universities are the great legacy of Gabriel Ferraté, who died yesterday at the age of 91 in Barcelona. But his multiple professional and personal interests draw an unrepeatable personality that has caused admiration in all the responsibilities he has exercised.
Born in Reus in 1932, his father dedicated himself to the wine business and his mother was a sculptor when she was young, but he was passionate about electronics. While still a student, he already had a reputation as an inventor. He made a watch with Meccano parts and assembled radio sets that he sold to fellow students. He finished his studies as an Agricultural Expert and Industrial Engineer and stayed at the university. At the age of 33 he obtained the first chair of Automation in Spain. Before, he had already founded the company Ciber, later converted into Eyssa, with which he renewed traffic with a computerized traffic light control system, which was later acquired by several countries.
In that stagnant Francoist university, Ferraté could not sit still. After directing the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineers, in 1972 he was appointed rector of the Polytechnic, then called Barcelona. He begins the expansion with new centers in Lleida and Girona, incorporates the schools of Terrassa, Vilanova and Manresa, and creates the first Calculation Center, which will be directed by Martí Vergés, whom he considered one of his mentors.
In the midst of the transition, he was appointed general director of Universities and Research and encountered entrenched immobility in the upper echelons. Every morning the office was full of police reports about student or PNN protests. Among the press clippings that he collected, he liked to show the note that the civil governor of Tenerife sent him after prohibiting a performance by Lluís Llach at the University of La Laguna: “In reality we did not prohibit the recital, but rather we warned that the public force would enter, if this were held.”
After three months he asked to move to the general directorate of Scientific Policy. "I couldn't stand that brutal pressure one more day," he explained in the book/interview What Gabriel Ferraté thinks, "think that the Madrid police chief even told me: 'Nothing has changed here because if something had changed they would have changed me.' changed to me.'” They relieved the minister and suggested that he stop. He reacted with his style: he would make it easy for him if in exchange the decree of recognition of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans was approved. This was done and he returned to Catalonia. In June 1978 he was once again rector of the Polytechnic.
Ferraté renewed the entire structure of the UPC and created the North Campus and the Castelldefels Campus. His subsequent arrival at the UOC aroused envy in the rest of the universities, because he took off with enormous force. He also surprised journalists at every press conference. The most memorable, the one he organized in a farmhouse in Vallès. Ferraté, in a suit and tie, was waiting for them, sitting on a folding chair with his laptop on his lap, in the middle of a meadow, next to a cow. The headline of La Vanguardia was: “The cows moo in the Virtual Campus.”
He was also president of the Institut Cerdà, the Fundació Caixa de Tarragona and the Consell Assessor per al Desenvolupament Sostenible and a member of the Spanish chapter of the Club of Rome. He was active in the CDC but rejected all the positions offered to him, including that of counselor. And when they asked him about his many recognitions (Creu de Sant Jordi, Narcís Monturiol medal, gold medal for scientific merit from the Barcelona City Council, illustrious son of Reus, Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic of Madrid...), he diverted attention to his love for collecting: books of poetry and history, pipes, classical music records, screws and, the most unusual, a collection of frogs made of all types of materials, since according to his version these amphibians shout “uoc, uoc”. His anecdotes helped to understand the multifaceted and nonconformist personality of a great worker.
