As president of Longwood College from 1981-87, Dr. Janet Greenwood modernized the school in ways still felt today—academically, culturally and financially. Later in her career, as the co-founder and CEO of the higher-ed executive search firm Greenwood/Asher & Associates, she connected talented faculty and administrators with universities around the country based on need, credentials and mutual fit.
Now Greenwood, who oversaw one of the most impactful periods of growth in Longwood’s modern history, is putting her diverse professional expertise into action for the institution once again by establishing the Drs. John T. Casteen III and Janet D. Greenwood University Professorship.
Named partly in honor of Greenwood’s longtime colleague and fellow leader of higher education in Virginia, the late Dr. John Casteen III, the professorship will annually fund the academic work of a Longwood faculty member from a department of university leadership’s choosing.
Those parameters make Greenwood’s professorship the most versatile of the eight that compose Longwood’s groundbreaking endowed professorship initiative—which raised millions in donations from 10 donors during the 2026 fiscal year, including a matching gift from Joan Perry Brock ’64. That flexibility is by design, Greenwood says, to allow Longwood’s leadership to award the funds “based on the needs of the university or the opportunities they see at that moment.”
“Having done the executive search work for so many years, and working with primarily ‘Research One’ universities, I know what appeals to top scholars,” Greenwood said. “I see this endowed university professorship with John’s and my name on it as an opportunity to continue building a top scholar group for the university.”
The versatile structure of the professorship reflects the holistic view of higher education that drove Greenwood’s leadership at Longwood, the influence of which is still evident today. During her term at Longwood, in which she was the first woman president of a four-year and graduate institution in Virginia, she expanded the college’s academic offerings by adding multiple majors; emphasized a broader, more all-encompassing education of its students to include explorations of morality, honor, integrity, ethics and community; and established the foundations of numerous campus resources that remain today, including the Greenwood Library—for which she secured state funding to establish—and an arts and sciences honors program.
And as the latest example of the lifelong impact Greenwood has made on the university, the Casteen and Greenwood University Professorship further empowers Longwood to develop and support talented educators in the ever-evolving landscape of higher education—within which, she says, Longwood has long been driven by a unique institutional ideology.
At an institution like Longwood, there’s a deeply rooted emphasis on faculty working directly with students. There are other universities that can say that, but the thing that distinguishes Longwood is the student development piece.
Dr. Janet D. Greenwood
“At an institution like Longwood, there’s a deeply rooted emphasis on faculty working directly with students,” she said. “There are other universities that can say that, but the thing that distinguishes Longwood is the student development piece. That is unique in the way it’s become operationalized and a genuine part of the culture at Longwood.”
Those values have long driven the culture on Longwood’s campus, and Greenwood has played a major role in bringing them to the forefront of the modern identity of the college, both as president and in the decades since. Along with the programs she and Vice President of Student Affairs Phyllis Mable—whom, in one of her first and most impactful moves as Longwood’s president, Greenwood hired—instituted, Greenwood also recently made a historically large eight-figure estate gift to create the university’s new Keystones for Academic Excellence (KAE) Fund.
Similarly versatile to the Casteen and Greenwood Professorship, the KAE Fund serves as an incubator and accelerator to launch new initiatives, expand proven ideas and respond to new opportunities to support student success and enhance Longwood's academic reputation. More broadly, it aligns with the same priorities inherent to the endowed professorship initiative: fostering the genuine culture of connection on Longwood’s campus, and enhancing the academic prowess of the university.
“The professorship will appeal to people who really want to be able to focus on the students and have a sense of the total student development—of which, of course, academics is a key component,” Greenwood said. “That’s a distinguishing mark for why someone would want to come work at Longwood.”
The notion of a professorship that serves to support faculty in their scholarly pursuits was born from Greenwood and Casteen’s shared views of the role of faculty in higher education—as not just teachers, but scholars and mentors who have the power to influence the student experience and the trajectory of the institution as a whole.
“For me, it’s simply the ability to go into a setting that’s been committed, for well over a century, to building top teachers and top scholars, and doing so within an environment that’s not a Research One culture,” Greenwood said. “It’s a serious statement about intensity and emphasis on academic quality and total student development. There are very few places that can tell that story in the same way Longwood can.”