Sir Derek Roberts
Leader in integrated circuit technology and forthright Provost of University College London
SIR DEREK ROBERTS, who has died aged 88, was an industrial scientist who served two terms as Provost of University College London, from 1989 to 99 and 2002 to 03, but discovered during his second term that business and academe make uncomfortable bedfellows.
UCL broke with tradition in appointing an industrialist (Roberts was joint deputy managing director of Arnold Weinstock’s GEC), to the Provostship. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham had been a previous holder of the office, his mummified body on display in a college corridor reminding passers-by of the college’s proud traditions.
Renowned as a “street fighter” – one journalist described him as a man who preferred to “beat through the bush rather than around it” – Roberts took over when UCL was heading towards technical bankruptcy. Over his first 10 years he restored its finances and oversaw several mergers with smaller outfits to position UCL among the market leaders.
In 1999, the year he retired for the first time, UCL received the highest percentage increase of any university from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Only Oxford and Cambridge got more.
In 1994 Roberts was an architect of the Russell Group, the elite corps of top British research universities, and was scathing about the decision by John Major’s government to give polytechnics university status. “If you look through the results of the research assessment,” he told an interviewer in 1999, “you find Cambridge at the top and Luton at the bottom, and to suggest they are equivalent … is not just stupid, it is damaging to Luton. The point is recognising diversity.”
Roberts returned to UCL as acting provost in the summer of 2002 after his successor, Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, fell on his sword after an unpopular restructuring exercise, but this time his tenure ended in near meltdown. Shortly after his appointment he and his friend and counterpart at Imperial College, Sir Richard Sykes (former head of Glaxosmithkline) announced proposals to merge the two institutions into a super-university which could, they argued, eclipse Oxford and Cambridge in research funding and compete with global giants such as Harvard.
UCL academics went ballistic, however, opponents of the plan arguing that consolidation and takeovers belonged in the world of business, and claiming that the rationalisation of departments would result in job losses. Even Jeremy Bentham was wheeled out to answer questions on a website. “I share your consternation at the importunate rapidity with which Provost Roberts is advancing his arguments,” Bentham informed one inquirer: “It was ever the case in this world, alas, that what has been painstakingly constructed over centuries may be reduced to rubble within moments.”
Roberts was infuriated by what he called the “lies” of critics, but was forced to concede that the idea would have to be dropped.
Derek Harry Roberts was born in Manchester on March 28 1932 to Harry Roberts and Alice, née Storey and educated at Manchester Central High School and the University of Manchester, where he read Physics.
After graduation in 1953 he became a research scientist at Plessey where he was an early leader in the advancement of now-ubiquitous silicon-based integrated circuit technology, and rose to be managing director of its microelectronics division.
In 1979 he moved to head GEC’S research activities, revamping its semiconductor programme, setting up its Long Range Research Laboratory and becoming joint deputy managing director with Malcolm Bates until his appointment at UCL. He remained a non-executive director of GEC until 1993.
In 1996 he was elected president of the British Science Association, using the position to declare that there would be social and economic decline unless “dishonest and incompetent” politicians were more scientific in policy making.
Elected to fellowships of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Engineers in 1980, Roberts was appointed CBE in 1983 and knighted in 1995.
In 1958 he married Winifred Short, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Sir Derek Roberts, born March 28 1932, died February 17 2021