Dr. Gina Ann Garcia - On Becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution
The Office of University Diversity & Inclusion is excited to welcome Dr. Gina Ann Garcia to Cal Poly to provide a keynote address in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month on Thursday, September 29 from 11 am - 12:30 pm in Chumash Auditorium.
Dr. Garcia's keynote address will seek to help students, faculty, staff and administrators understand how to serve an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse undergraduate population. Dr. Garcia will draw from her book Becoming Hispanic Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities, describing the different “types” of HSIs: Latinx-enrolling, Latinx-enhancing, Latinx-producing, and Latinx-serving. She will then provide evidence of how HSIs fit within these types based on empirical data collected with three HSIs in Chicago, while also challenging audience members to think about how becoming an HSI is an individual process for Cal Poly.
Dr. Gina Ann Garcia Biography
Dr. Gina Ann Garcia is an associate professor in the department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research centers on issues of equity and justice in higher education with an emphasis on understanding how Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) embrace and enact an organizational identity for serving minoritized populations. She also seeks to understand the experiences of administrators, faculty, and staff within HSIs and the outcomes and experiences of students attending these institutions. Finally, her research looks at the ways that race and racism have shaped the experiences of minoritized groups in higher education.
Dr. Garcia is the author of Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges & Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) for which she won the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Book of the Year Award in 2020 and the editor of the book Hispanic-Serving Institutions in Practice: Defining “Servingness” at HSIs (Information Age Publishing, 2020). Her forthcoming book, Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) will be available in Spring 2023. She has delivered over 100 public lectures and workshops across the country and consults directly with HSIs to work towards organizational transformation.
Dr. Garcia graduated from California State University, Northridge with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, the University of Maryland, College Park with a master’s degree in college student personnel, and the University of California, Los Angeles with a Ph.D. in higher education and organizational change. She is a proud alumna of a HSI (CSUN) and was a Title V Coordinator at Cal State University, Fullerton which drives and motivates her research and praxis.
Dr. Garcia lives and works on the ancestral lands of the Adena, Hopewell, and Monongahela People and shared over time with tribes that were forcibly removed from their lands including Delaware, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee.
Learn more about her on her website.
