Dr. García has been involved in diversity efforts in higher education since she was a student at Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1978-82, when she worked on the recruitment and retention of Latinx students, and was appointed as the first Hispanic Liaison to the Bureau of Study Counsel. While a graduate student at The Ohio State University, she also focused her efforts on diversity, including contributing to the proposal for a Latino/a Studies Program, and serving in the Hispanic Oversight Committee, which provided feedback to the Executive Vice President and Provost.
At Kenyon College, she continued to pursue her life-long passion, contributing to the Diversity Advisory Council, to institutionalizing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Dialogue, and serving on the regional consortium Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) Committee for Institutional Commitment to Educational Equity (CICEE). She also is a founding faculty member of the Latinx Studies Concentration at Kenyon College.
From 2011 to 2019, Dr. García was Faculty Co-Director of the Kenyon Educational Enrichment Program (KEEP), the college’s competitive and rigorous six-week summer college-transition program for underrepresented admitted first-year students. The program achieved 96 percent persistence from one year to the next for participating students. As part of this four-year program, selected students take two credit-bearing courses (Writing and Data or STEM) during the summer prior to their first year, and are introduced to the College’s resources. Established in 2007, KEEP is also designed to act as a professional development medium by training upper-level students as Teaching Assistants, who then provide support to the faculty and teach evening sessions during the summer courses.
In 2014, President Sean Decatur tapped Dr. García to become the first Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, reporting to him and to Provost Joseph Klesner, and working closely with the newly created Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI) to provide campus-wide programming to improve the climate of diversity at Kenyon College.
As Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion she functioned as the Equal Employment Opportunity Officer (EEO) for all faculty searches, and supervised the Discrimination Advisors, a group of students, faculty, and staff who act as informal advisors on issues of diversity and campus climate.
In July 2015, Dr. García was promoted to full-time Associate Provost. She served in that position until June 2017, participating in Senior Staff (the committee of senior leadership in the college that advises the President), and on the Executive Committee of the Faculty. As Associate Provost, she specialized in supporting and mentoring junior and underrepresented faculty.
In January 2019, Dr. García was named the first Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at The College of Wooster. She began her position at The College of Wooster full-time on June 1, 2019. During her time there, she reported to President Sarah Bolton, was responsible for working with students, staff, faculty, alumni, the community, and the Board of Trustees, and developed more than 13 workshops and trainings to support diversity and antiracist efforts.
On June 1, 2021, Dr. García joined the Harvard Graduate School of Education as the inaugural Senior Instructional Coach for Anti-Racist Pedagogy as part of that institution’s Anti-Racist Teaching and Advising (ARTA) initiative, which is part of their Teaching and Learning Lab. In October 2021, she became the inaugural Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the HGSE.