Destiny’s child

In the spirit of evening camaraderie the engineering student was persuaded by friends to sing his favorite song.
  It was an unlikely tune for a German citizen to know, much less sing, considering the bellicose mood of Berlin just before World War II. Nonetheless, Ernst-Wilhelm Ruhl gave voice to “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”
Amid the din of barroom cheer and click of toasting glasses he sang of a place “where the birds warble sweet in the springtime.” Even as he sang, the pitiless grinding wheels of war were beginning to growl, and soon few would have the heart to sing at all.
When war came, Ruhl was forced to leave school and don the gray uniform of the German Wehrmacht. Even more painful was having to leave his pregnant wife.
The young soldier never returned home, his life having ebbed away in some unknowable place. Yet, through some ineffable orchestration, the dreams of the father somehow became realized in the life of the daughter he never knew.
In 1973 Ingrid Soudek Townsend joined the faculty of the humanities division of the University of Virginia’s Engineering School. The appointment prompted her mother to share with her a bit of information she had never known.
“It was only after I came here to the university that my mother told me about my father’s favorite song and how he would sing it if somebody bought him a drink,” Townsend said one recent morning as she relaxed in an easy chair in her Charlottesville home.
“I have always felt my father’s presence in my life. If I accomplished
something I felt good about I would say to him, ‘You didn’t get a chance to do this, but I did.
“ ‘You didn’t get a chance to be an engineer, but I got to be in the engineering school. And I got to go to Virginia.’ ”
Townsend will retire next month after a 34-year career at the university. She was hired by Luther Y. Gore, who at the time was chairman of the humanities division, now known as the department of science, technology and society.
Townsend was the first full-time female faculty member hired at UVa’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. But it was her abilities and knowledge, not her gender, that landed her the job.
“Ingrid was very competent and knowledgeable and had a background in comparative literature from the University of Michigan,” said Gore, who worked with Townsend at the university until his retirement in 1993.
“We were looking for a new member to round out some programs we were developing at the time. Ingrid was highly qualified for it. She had a very inquiring mind and didn’t just accept things without examining them very thoroughly.
“And she was very helpful in suggesting new ideas for the humanities division. She helped us have a good broad look at how literature often reflects what is going on in a society in terms of the technologies the society is dealing with.”
The university had begun admitting female undergraduate students only as recently as Sept. 1, 1970. Townsend proved instrumental in helping female students, as well as female teachers, become comfortable in the previously all-male environment.
“Overall, I think the men were very good about accepting me when I was hired,” Townsend said. “There were a few incidents that were definitely sexist, where people didn’t know how to react.
“For example, early on I wanted to teach the senior course, and there was one person in particular who was concerned. He said, ‘Gosh, Ingrid, you’re not very big and some of these guys are really big.’
“It actually made me laugh, and I thought it was kind of naive. But they had never worked with women before. I said, ‘Let me try it in summer school and see how it goes.’
“So they did, and it was just fine. After that, I could teach the seniors and nobody said another word.”
A colleague whom Townsend grew to greatly admire and care for was the late Joseph L. Vaughan. Around 1932 he started the humanities division, which was originally titled “Engineering English.”
“Joe was a wonderful man, and far ahead of his time,” said Townsend, who was recently honored with the establishment of the Townsend Prize, which recognizes the best undergraduate research paper in STS 101. “What we teach is the interface between technology and society.
“We teach that engineers can’t just focus on the technical aspect, they have to consider human factors — how society is affected by what they do. It’s always thinking about: What does this technology mean?
“How does it affect everything else? If I’m going to put this into the workplace, what will it do to the workplace or to society? And is it ethical? In other words, it’s about looking outward at possible consequences.”
Townsend said her memories of war have greatly influenced her life and career by illustrating the need for ethics and the importance of contemplating consequences. Born May 2, 1942, her first memory is of terror and helpless vulnerability.
“My mother and grandmother were fleeing Berlin, and they had me in a stroller,” Townsend said. “What I remember in particular is that we had to go on a ferry.
“After we crossed over, they had to pull me up an embankment. I remember having this horrible fear that they were going to let go of the stroller I was in.
“Because of the war, I’ve always been aware of death, and I’ve always been aware of trying to do something positive in the short time that I’m here. We all have our foibles and failures, but I keep trying to do better, and I can trace that back to those insecure times when I didn’t know what was next.”
The privation and horror of war did not end when the guns went silent. Berlin was in ruins, and the grotesque mask of madness could be seen everywhere.
“People had gone crazy, and after the war there were a lot of children being murdered,” Townsend said. “As a child, that really frightened me.
“My school was the only building on the street that wasn’t bombed, and we had to go in shifts. There wasn’t enough food. We ate nettles and stuff that grew along the side of roads.
“My memories of American GIs are very positive. My first English words were ‘Give me gum.’ When I was in elementary school, the American Red Cross sent over food so we would get free lunches, which meant a lot.”
In 1955 Townsend and her mother immigrated to the United States and went to Ann Arbor, Mich., where a relative lived. She worked her way through the University of Michigan, where she earned a doctorate in comparative literature with an emphasis on man and the machine.
Townsend’s life experiences gave her a heartfelt empathy for female students, who in the early 1970s, were just starting to populate college classes. Her presence alone was reassuring.
“When I came to UVa, I was lucky if I had one or two females in a class,” said Townsend, who wants to be remembered as a caring, good teacher. “I felt it was really important for them to have a female role model, and I think it made a huge difference.
“For example, if during a class discussion we got into sexism or how we should treat people in the workplace, the young women would always look to me as though to say, ‘What is she going to say now?’
“At first the female students were hesitant to speak up in class. But in a couple years, they were right in there during discussions.”
In 1993 Townsend was appointed chair of STS and held the position until 2000. In 1996 she helped persuade former NASA astronaut Kathryn C. Thornton to join the faculty.
“Being a physicist in an engineering school, and one who had not been doing research recently, it wasn’t real clear where I would fit in at the engineering school,” said Thornton, associate dean in the STS department. “It was largely Ingrid’s leadership that got me here.
“I felt she was very inclusive. Everybody mattered to her, and everybody’s opinion mattered and got folded into whatever decision she would make.
“Shortly after I got here, she organized the Women’s Faculty Lunch. We would have a lunch once a month and talk about issues. I know some of the issues were elevated to the dean from that, and he was receptive to hearing from that group.”
Thornton said she will miss seeing Townsend as frequently as she has. She added that students as well as teachers will be losing a special person.
“Ingrid had a lot of one-on-one meetings with her students,” said Thornton, who logged nearly a 1,000 hours in space, 21 of them outside space shuttles during three space walks. “If a student she was meeting with was interested in NASA or space, she would invite me to sit in on the meeting.
“She spent a lot of time with students individually, and that’s not all that common in a large university. She is a good person through and through and will be greatly missed.”
Townsend is looking forward to her retirement years with excitement. She is a talented stone and wood carver and plans to do more of that.
But when the new school year starts, she will likely miss the excitement she always woke with on the first day of school.
“Because I live so close to the university, I’m real conscious of the students and their movement,” Townsend said. “During the summer everything is real quiet, but then the town starts to vibrate and everything gets real busy.
“The students are running around, and you see first-year students and they look so helpless. I always loved walking into the classroom on the first day of school.
There’s just something really exciting about all that. You feel that life is going on. Learning is going on. People are full of their potential. It’s great.”
Townsend sees her retirement as the beginning of a new life, which she will be sharing with her children and husband, Miles. She leaves her teaching career feeling fulfilled that she was able to help future engineers realize the importance of considering humanity as they create.
On the wall outside Townsend’s bedroom is a picture of her father. Tucked into a corner of the frame is a grade-school picture of herself.
Sometimes the professor sits by the picture, gazes at the handsome profile and thinks about the dream that was realized through her. When she wants to feel particularly close to her father, she strolls over to the section of the UVa Cemetery that contains the unmarked graves of Confederate soldiers.
“What touches me is the Confederate statue and all the unknown soldiers who are buried around it,” Townsend said. “It touches me to the core, because that’s my father, too.
“All that lost potential. But I got to accomplish some of the things he had wanted to do, and that makes me feel very good.”