Cabrillo College to establish committee to decide whether to change name
APTOS, Calif. (KION) -– The process of possibly renaming Cabrillo College has gained momentum.
The Cabrillo College Governing Board voted in favor of establishing a subcommittee that would undergo a months-long process of considering whether to rename Cabrillo College.
The community college said the discussion came up in the wake of enhanced awareness over social injustice.
“History is a discipline that is regularly revisiting the assumptions we make, about stories we tell, and about what happened," Cabrillo College President Dr. Matt Wetstein said.
“For me that’s a really offense name to put on my degree and for me to be doing my work under,” recent Cabrillo College graduate Madison Raasch said.
Raasch first learned about the school’s name sake, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in an anthropology of natives peoples course on campus. She discovered more of the history behind the conquistador credited with leading the first European exploration to the West Coast.
“He ran mines that used slave labor, and he was a documented serial rapist and the genocide of native peoples…he didn’t do anything positive in our community in any real way," Raasch said.
Those against changing the Cabrillo name, that’s existed since the schools inception in 1959, argue the costs and logistics may not be worth the effort.
"I would ask how a symbolic change like this is supposed to advance anything in terms of material improvements and of course would ask how it would be paid for?” Cabrillo College professor Jeffrey Bergamini said during the board meeting Monday night.
Wetstein said the change could be more than a $1 million undertaking.
“There are all of these costs that role out over a year or so before you can get done with all of that re-labeling and re-naming,” the college's president said.
Cabrillo College has multiple monuments and places named after him both locally and throughout California, including the Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma in San Diego, several high schools and middle schools throughout the state, various beaches, and stretches of the Cabrillo Highway along the coast.
After hearing from the public, the Board voted to create its own, subcommittee that would solicit input from multiple entities.
People from the business, education, and Cabrillo alumni community will be invited to provide input in this study process. The subcommittee will develop recommendations that get brought back to the Governing Board for a vote.
The school says renaming it involves operational and fiscal costs that must be considered, including: changing signage, both on the campus and on highways and roadways, changing way-finding maps, and other operational impacts such as the College's website domain name, marketing materials, and legal costs associated with a name change.
