Mike and Janet Greene
Enduring Legacy
Engineering Endowment
Summer 2011 · Comment ·
Mike Greene had heard about a new engineering program at UT Arlington as a student at Saginaw’s Boswell High School in the early 1960s. He’d always dreamed of becoming an engineer, and Arlington was close to home. “It turned out to be a great experience,” he says. Greene, who earned his mechanical engineering degree from UT Arlington in 1969, eventually became vice chairman of Energy Future Holdings, formerly TXU. After serving in various leadership positions with the company, including CEO of Luminant and president of Oncor, he retired in June 2010 after 46 years. Greene and his wife, Janet, have created a College of Engineering endowment with a $500,000 gift that over time will equal $1 million through the Maverick Match program, which pairs the University’s natural gas royalties with new endowment commitments for maximum impact. “We want to give back to the university that helped me, and we hope it serves as an example to others,” Greene says. “I was fortunate to attend a great engineering school and get an education that helped me throughout my career.” In recognition of the gift, UT Arlington will name the courtyard of the new 234,000-square-foot Engineering Research Building the Janet and Michael Greene Research Quadrangle.
