Hartnell faculty resurrect an idea to give the school a name that carries less baggage.

To hear some tell of it, William Edward Petty Hartnell was kind of a slacker and kind of a sponge. At the age of 27, the British-born Hartnell married the 16-year-old daughter of the richest man in the region, he launched a hide and tallow business that left him debt ridden and in need of financial assistance from his father-in-law, he launched a private school that served mostly his own children and there’s at least some dispute over whether the Indigenous people who lived on his rancho located in what’s now North Salinas were enslaved.

And those are just a few of the reasons – along with the current political climate that is seeing various monuments to the country’s colonial and racist history torn down (or, in the case of a statue of California mission founder Junipero Serra, placed in a Carmel Public Library closet for safekeeping) – that some current and former Hartnell Community College faculty members are calling for the Hartnell name to be stripped from the school and renamed with something more representative of the region or the student population it serves.

Suggestions include naming the school after Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huerta, or naming it Salinas Valley Community College. Until the late 1940s, when its name was changed to Hartnell College, the school had been named Salinas Junior College. While students rejected a name change, the Board of Trustees did an end run on those wishes when a single student asked for the Hartnell name.

Thirty-year faculty member Ana DeJesus Riley, a member of the social sciences department who teaches history and ethnic studies, says the idea to rename the school has floated around for years, ever since she made it an assignment for students to investigate who Hartnell was as a person.

“For the first time, we became aware of his history and who he really was,” DeJesus Riley says. “People say he created the first college in California but that’s not true – it’s a misinterpretation. He created a colegio, a private school, but not a college. He had Indigenous people on his rancho who were allowed to live there as long as they worked for him, and technically they were Indian slaves.

“He was an alcoholic failure at every job,” she adds. “His bios talk about this ability to pick himself up and start over again, but if your father-in-law is the richest guy in California, it’s pretty easy to pick yourself up and start over again.”

In an email to faculty, DeJesus Riley writes that “as faculty we can no longer allow the name of a slave holder to identify our college… let’s respect our students and the lives of the Indigenous people whose name is on our college.”

Retired faculty member Juan Olivares, a former Salinas city councilmember and sociologist by trade who taught political science, Chicano studies and history for 40 years at Hartnell and elsewhere, says the Hartnell name is a symptom of a much bigger problem – systemic racism.

“[Hartnell] acquired a lot, but he didn’t earn any of it,” Olivares says. “It really bothers some of us. He wasn’t a true Californio but he was landed and the only reason for that was his father-in-law. He’s been given credit for things he wasn’t great at.”

Hartnell spokesperson Scott Faust says the school has no comment at this time.