Always a professor

Always as professor and now as UA Dean of the College of Education and Health Professions, Kate Mamiseishvili aims to make higher education opportunities as accessible as possible for all

Kate Mamiseishvili aims to make higher education more accessible.

When Kate Mamiseishvili arrived on the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus as an exchange student from the country of Georgia, she could not have imagined that she would still be stateside more than 20 years later.

She had been set to stay for only a year and was intent on becoming a doctor after a short stint of studying language and literature in another country. But her early time in America uncovered a passion for higher education and a series of opportunities that gave her progressively more experience in it.

On Feb. 1 of this year, Mamiseishvili became the first female dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. This is her first fall semester leading 6,000 students, 160 faculty and 300 staff members in the full-fledged capacity after a period as interim dean that lasted seven months.

“Every morning, I wake up energized and excited about coming to work (for) the conversations we have and the decisions we’re going to make, what we can improve and the actions we can engage in,” Mamiseishvili said from her office in the Graduate Education building.

The initiative encourages collaboration “to address complex challenges in education and health,” according to a newswire article released in February. It shows care for Arkansas and its citizens by expanding service through educational experiences and meaningful partnerships, advancing impactful research to promote innovative solutions in education and health; and fosters a caring culture.

The initiative is grounded in work done last year. Now, Mamiseishvili said, they have the organizational structure to activate it.

WECARE provides priorities, pillars that resonate with faculty and provide opportunities for them and staff to engage in the work that aligns with them.

“It has been part of the college identity for a while, what unites education and health, the caring professionals, to take care of people

“Being dean of this college requires numerous skills and Kate has them all: she’s a visionary, goal-oriented, (has) perseverance, communicator, decisiveness, caring and (has an) ability to connect with diverse groups.”

— Dr. M. Reed Greenwood, former dean of the UA College of Education and Health Professions.

in their greatest need, when it’s health and well being, to provide them opportunities,” Mamiseishvili said. “It’s always been a part of that, but (WECARE places it) front and center. It frames everything we do.”

The first post-pandemic year was an important moment for education and health. Mamiseishvili said she wanted to capture that momentum through the initiative, allow faculty and staff to work on things they are passionate about and provide them with resources they didn’t have before.

“Being dean of this college requires numerous skills, and Kate has them all,” said Dr. M. Reed Greenwood, who retired as the dean of the UA College of Education in 2009. He describes her as a “visionary,” adding the descriptors “goal oriented, perseverance, communicator, decisiveness, caring and ability to connect with diverse groups.”

Mamiseishvili joined the UA in 2008 as a professor of higher education and earned many awards and accolades in her tenure as a faculty member.

She was inducted to the Teaching Academy, received the College of Education and Health Professions’ Rising S.T.A.R. award and the S.T.A.R. Faculty awards for outstanding performance in teaching, research, advising and service; was recognized as an Outstanding Mentor by the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards; and was selected as a fellow of the SEC Academic Leadership Development Program.

Ashlie Hilbun, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, had Mamiseishvili on her dissertation committee when she was a doctoral student in the college and says the newly named dean has a lot to be proud of, most of all the impact that she’s made and the way she’s gone about it.

“She’s forged a leadership path for so many women at the university that is built on caring about people first,” Hilbun said. “She should be proud of the way she inspires people, not only to think, but to care.”

Hilbun believes Mamiseishvili is the type of leader that can change lives and change the world.

“She’s brilliant, but her intellectual brilliance is not her superpower,” she said. “Her desire to truly instill greatness in her students, her team, her community — that is her superpower.

“I absolutely promise you, Dr. Mamiseishvili is just getting started.”

BIRTH OF A COUNTRY

Young Kate Mamiseishvili grew up behind the Iron Curtain, meaning on the daily level that she missed out on all the good ’80s music as it was first popular. Georgia was fresh out of the Soviet Union and trying a fledgling independence, quite literally building itself up.

“Sometimes it’s hard to think about that,” Mamiseishvili said. “But imagine building all the infrastructure — the government, police, the private sector, businesses, (learning) what’s our agriculture like, what’s the government structure — to create order in a country. It was a lot of chaos and extreme poverty.”

It has come a long way since then, but in the early years, Kate felt the “heart checks and pride” associated with finally being their own country, being on the map.

“It took a lot of resilience and perseverance of people to keep trying and help each other,” she said. “There was no way to get through that without each other.”

Many things that Americans take for granted were not a given in her childhood: heat, electricity, running water, nutritious meals. She says with a laugh that she showered in rainwater more times than she could count. But it was the very strong sense of community that tempered the circumstances.

Whenever the electricity went out, each family member would leave their own individual rooms and gather around candlelight in the one room with heat. Mamiseishvili has fond memories of taking turns talking about each other’s day, playing cards and generally passing the time with family members and neighbors in those dark hours.

Transportation was unreliable too, and the task of walking everywhere — to friends’ houses, to school — meant miles and miles spent chatting with friends.

“Now I think, ‘These walks were amazing,’” she said. “There were a lot of fun memories around that.”

In school, Mamiseishvili chose a major of English because to her it equalled access. It was a way to connect with western countries. Knowing the language would provide opportunities, she was sure. Kate earned a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from the Akaki Tsereteli State University in Georgia, then in 2001 was given a rare opportunity to come to the United States as an exchange student.

Columbia, Mo., was a sister city to Kutaisi in Georgia. They made a literal exchange by sending each other students — one from each university in both of the towns. Mamiseishvili was selected from her college and entered the University of Missouri as a linguistics student. It wound up being a great experience, she said.

While talking to an academic counselor in the international center on the Columbia campus, Kate asked whether there were any classes she could take to learn about U.S. higher education.

“I thought it would be interesting, to learn what higher education institutions are like here,” Mamiseishvili said. To her surprise, they had a program in educational leadership and policy analysis, and they offered that she start with the history of higher education. Kate would later teach that class at the University of Arkansas, and it became one of her favorites. “I fell in love with the idea that you can major in educational leadership.”

The professor who made the suggestion became her advisor; Kate switched from linguistics to the master’s program in educational leadership and got funded for a second year.

A WEALTH OF OPPORTUNITY

Taking that history of higher education class stemmed from Kate’s genuine fascination with being a student in the U.S. and its stark comparison to college in Georgia. Being on a major research university campus that had an “amazing library, recreation facilities and computer labs, professors to talk to and support services, I was just in awe of that experience,” she said. Her early curiosity was how that all came about; how the country built institutions like that.

In Georgia, Mamiseishvili always had great professors, but classrooms were entirely bare and sometimes, as happened at home, there was no heat or light. While the professors were dedicated to showing up, they weren’t rewarded with high salaries or incentives.

“There were people around you who were experts and cared for you,” she said. “But the vastness of campus, a campus that had everything: bookstore, dining halls, recreation and sports, clubs, classes with technology, computer labs, that whole concept of this campus that looks like a town, that was completely new, something that I did not expect.”

Being funded for a second year of American education allowed Kate to finish her master’s degree, then she was able to get a graduate assistantship working for her advisor Vicki Rosser, which paid for her Ph.D. program. At that time, she wasn’t thinking she would have a career in the U.S. necessarily, but she knew by then higher education was what she wanted to study and found Rosser incredibly supportive.

“I was going to go home after my master’s, but stayed for my doctorate,” Mamiseishvili said. “If (Rosser) hadn’t mentioned the assistantship, I wouldn’t have known.”

After earning her Ph.D. in educational leadership and policy analysis, Kate applied for work as a professor. Greenwood met her during his tenure as dean when she interviewed for a position in the higher education program at UA.

“She was talented, energetic and highly motivated to succeed,” he said. “It was a special treat to meet someone who was so interesting and coming here from the country of Georgia. Her English was exceptional, and she was so enthusiastic about coming to our college and the university.”

Kate was hired. Ashlie Hilbun remembers the exact moment that Mamiseishvili came into her life. It was through a template email congratulating her on her acceptance to the doctoral program in the College of Education and listing Kate as her temporary advisor. That was 13 years ago and now, she says, it’s safe to say she’s her permanent advisor.

“She was an incredibly generous and supportive mentor,” Hilbun said. Her first impressions of Kate were, “in a word, fascinating. She has a uniquely direct and warm way of communicating.”

A conversation that began with the need to turn in a paper or briefly get some feedback would end an hour and a half later, having shifted to talking about the Truman Commission Report or Washington’s Industrial Education Analysis. Hilbun appreciated that consistent encouragement for deep thinking and quickly learned that the “yes! Now keep going,” way about Kate would always be present, always encouraging her to push harder.

“She was always good at deepening my thinking, broadening my perspective and then surprising me either with a generous compliment or the challenge to totally rewrite from a different perspective,” Hilbun said. “But you always knew she believed in you the whole time.”

Now, Mamiseishvili and Hilbun work together in a new capacity. Ashlie is on the Dean’s Executive Advisory Board, and she says you’d never know that she was once the understudy. Kate interacts with her today with a respect for the professional knowledge she’s garnered over the last decade.

“It’s one of the most remarkable things about her,” Hilbun said. “She doesn’t put anyone in a category or a specific, finite role. We have more in common today than ever before in terms of where we want to see our community grow and improve.”

LANDING IN LOVE

Mamiseishvili’s rise to leadership has been a swift one, taking her from professor to head of the Department of Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders in 2013, where she led a unit of seven academic programs and the Speech and Hearing clinic with more than 40 faculty members and 800 students.

From 2017-21, she served as the associate dean for academic and student affairs in the College of Education and Health Professions. Following that, Kate became interim vice provost for academic affairs until Terry Martin was named permanent provost for the university.

Somewhere along the way, Kate met John Pijanowski, who also teaches educational leadership in the college. They would bump into each other from time to time at various work and social events, but while working in the Graduate Education building one summer, they both chose to take a break and sit on the wooden benches facing the Old Main arboretum. That’s the first time they began to talk about something other than work.

“Kate stood out immediately by how engaging she was,” Pijanowski said. “Whenever someone would walk in the room, she was genuinely focused on them and interested in what they had on their mind. I could see how much people lit up when they talked with her — she just had this way of lifting people’s spirits.”

John was drawn to Kate for her manner of making those around her feel welcome and comfortable. He found it was easy to be around her and quickly realized how bright she is, then soon came to appreciate her inner confidence. Their first date was a day of hiking around Devil’s Den State Park.

As they fell in love, Pijanowski took a trip to Georgia and got to know her on a deeper level. He could only know her better, all sides of her, in the context of her home country, where she talked expressively in Georgian, ate the food she grew up with, laughed and danced with friends she’s known her entire life.

Then he spent time in Georgia on a Fulbright exchange, negotiating the language, immersing himself in the culture and spending time with Kate’s parents Darejan and Enrico, which connected the dots for him.

“Kate embodies the resiliency, strong sense of community responsibility and gratitude I saw throughout my time in Georgia,” Pijanowski said. “People who only know her from her time in the U.S. would be stunned to know the hardships she came from during her teen years spanning the fall of the Soviet Union to the rebirth of Georgia as an independent country.

“She usually doesn’t talk about it, but her path from then to now is astounding.”

While there are so many professional accomplishments that Mamiseishvili should naturally take pride in, John thinks the thing she should be most proud of is her friendships. Kate has had the same large group of friends since they were all in kindergarten together. Every year on her birthday in the spring, her friends back home visit her parents and celebrate her together. She returns for a couple weeks each summer.

“Keeping relationships strong with so many obstacles does not happen by accident,” Pijanowski said. “The love they share with each other and the bonds they have held so closely together over so much time and distance is rare and truly wonderful.”