At the end of 1983, the Minister of Universities Josep Laporte asked Gabriel Ferraté to create a Catalan distance university. Ferraté was finishing his term as rector of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 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 this Sunday 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. From a very young age he already had a reputation as an inventor. He made a watch with Meccano parts and assembled radio sets that he sold to 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 computerized traffic light control, later acquired by several countries.
In that stagnant Francoist university, Ferrater could not sit still. He was first director of the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineers and in 1972 he was appointed rector of the UPC. 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. 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.
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 for another day,” he explained in the book-interview What Gabriel Ferraté thinks. “I think that the chief of police of Madrid even told me: ‘Nothing has changed here because if something had changed they would have changed me.’ changed me.’” They relieved the minister and suggested to him that they preferred his dismissal. Then he had a reaction very typical of him. It would make it easy for them 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 UPC.
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. In the future we could connect from any point. The headline of La Vanguardia was: “The cows moo in the Virtual Campus.”
He was also president of the Institut Cerdà and the Fundació Caixa de Tarragona. He was active in CDC but rejected several charges. And when they asked him about his many recognitions, he diverted attention to his hobby for collecting: books of poetry and history, pipes, classical music records, screws and, the most unusual, a collection of frogs made of all kinds of materials, already According to their version, these amphibians shout “uoc, uoc”. His anecdotes helped to understand the multifaceted and nonconformist personality of a great worker.
