At the end of 1993, the Minister of Universities Josep Laporte asked Gabriel Ferraté to create a distance learning Catalan university. Ferraté was ending his term as rector of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), after twenty years in the position, and he did not hesitate for a moment, but he set his conditions. Full freedom to direct the project and a flexible structure, without the rigidity of face-to-face universities. This is how he became the first chancellor of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), a position he held for nine years, until turning it into a center of reference.

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 worked in the wine business and his mother was a sculptor when she was young, but he was passionate about electronics. He soon had a reputation as an inventor. He made a clock out of Meccano parts and assembled radio sets that he sold to students. He finished the careers of Agricultural Expert and Industrial Engineer and stayed at the university. At the age of 33, he obtained the first Chair in Automation in Spain. He had previously founded the company Ciber, later converted to Eyssa, with which he renewed traffic with a computerized traffic light control system, which was later acquired by several countries.

In that rigid Francoist university, Ferraté could not stay still. After directing the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineers, he was appointed in 1972 rector of the Universitat Politècnica, named after Barcelona. The expansion then begins with new centers in Lleida and Girona, incorporates the schools of Terrassa, Vilanova and Manresa, and creates the first Center for Computing, directed by Martí Vergés who he considered one of his mentors.

In the middle of the transition, he was appointed director general of Universities and Research and ran into immobility encased in the upper echelons. Every morning the office was full of police reports about student or PNN protests. Among the press clippings he collected, he liked to show the note sent to him by the civil governor of Tenerife after he banned a performance by Lluís Llach at the University of La Laguna: “Actually we didn’t ban the recital, but we warn that the public force would enter, should it be celebrated”.

After three months he asked to move to the general directorate of Scientific Policy. “I couldn’t stand that brutal pressure for one more day – he explained in the book/interview What Gabriel Ferraté thinks – I think that the chief of police in Madrid told me: ‘Nothing has changed here because if something had changed they would have changed me'”. They relieved the minister and hinted to him to stop. He reacted in his very personal style: he would make it easy if in exchange the recognition decree of the Institute of Catalan Studies was approved. This was done and he returned to Catalonia. In June 1978 he was elected rector of the Polytechnic.

Ferraté renovated the entire structure of the UPC and created the North Campus and the one in Castelldefels. His subsequent arrival at the UOC aroused the envy of the other universities, because he emerged with great force, introduced new technologies to the university and was well received by the students. 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 in a folding chair with his laptop, in the middle of a meadow, next to a grazing cow. The headline of La Vanguardia was: “Las vacas mugen en el Campus Virtual”.

He was also president of the Cerdà Institute, the Caixa de Tarragona Foundation and the Advisory Council for Sustainable Development and a member of the Spanish chapter of the Club of Rome. He joined the CDC, but refused several positions such as councilor. And when they asked him about his many merits (Cross of Sant Jordi, Narcis Monturiol medal, gold medal for Scientific Merit from Barcelona City Council, Illustrious Son of Reus, Honoris Causa for the Polytechnic of Madrid…) , diverted attention to his hobby of collecting: books of poetry and history, pipes, classical music records, conch shells and, most unusual, a collection of frogs of all kinds of materials, which, according to their version, they say “uoc, uoc”. His anecdote helps to understand the multifaceted and non-conformist personality of a great worker.