The Last Commencement: Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh

There are certain documents that seem to hold a silence of their own. The paper softens, the ink fades, yet the gravity of what it once represented remains.

The Exercises of Graduation, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen at the Los Angeles State Normal School is one such artifact. Folded along its original crease, faintly tinted with time, it lists the names of students and faculty who stood at the threshold of a new century of learning. Among them appears Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh, printed for the last time as president of the institution he had shaped for more than a decade.

To hold this program today is to hold the close of an era.

It was June 22, 1916, and beneath the soft heat of a Los Angeles afternoon, the final class under Millspaugh’s leadership crossed the stage of the newly built Vermont Avenue campus. Within days, he would retire from public service. Newspapers across California acknowledged his departure with reverence, calling him “the clear-sighted educator who guided the school with wisdom, sanity, and force.”

Under his direction, the Los Angeles State Normal School had evolved from its modest beginnings at Fifth and Grand into one of the most forward-thinking teacher-training institutions in the country.

The campus he envisioned was not only functional but symbolic, built of brick, column, and corridor to reflect his belief in what education should represent: civic purpose, architectural order, and enduring spirit. To Dr. Millspaugh, a school was not merely a place of instruction but a moral design, created to cultivate both intellect and citizenship. The symmetry of the façade, the rhythm of its arches, and the measured geometry of its halls expressed his conviction that beauty and discipline could exist together, that even architecture could teach. In this way, the campus became a living expression of continuity and care.

A century later, these same principles remain legible in acts of preservation. The care extended to this program, its paper softened and its folds still holding the memory of a student’s hand, mirrors the discipline required to restore heirlooms with integrity. Both depend on proportion, restraint, and the quiet intention to preserve what deserves to endure. Restoration, like architecture, is built not from spectacle but from judgment.

Dr. Millspaugh’s career traced the movement of American education westward. Born in Michigan, he served as president of the Winona Normal School in Minnesota before leading public education in Salt Lake City, where he introduced reforms that taught moral values alongside academic excellence. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1904 to assume the presidency of the Normal School, the city was young, ambitious, and searching for an identity rooted in intellect as much as industry.

In his addresses, he often spoke of what he called “the architecture of citizenship.” He believed that education itself was a form of design, not of structures in stone, but of conscience and civic character. In his 1916 address, Preparedness Is Graduation Theme, he reminded students that “the real patriot lives for his country.” To him, the courage of the classroom mattered more than the courage of the battlefield. Teaching, in his view, was an act of preservation, shaping the moral framework of the nation from within.

The Vermont Avenue campus embodied that ideal. It was arranged not unlike a civic plaza, a democratic space of open sightlines and proportion. In 1914 the main building was named Millspaugh Hall in recognition of his vision. Two years later, as his final class graduated, the structure stood complete, the architectural echo of his philosophy rendered in stone and sunlight.

The 1916 graduation program now serves as both record and relic. Within its pages, the graduating class represents a cross-section of early twentieth-century Los Angeles: young women trained in art, literature, music, and domestic science, and men preparing for civic administration, manual training, and public service. Each name marked a beginning. Among them was my great-grandmother, one of the last students to graduate under Dr. Millspaugh’s leadership. Her presence bridges the private and the institutional, linking family memory to the founding era of higher learning in California.

Dr. Millspaugh retired quietly that summer. His health was declining, yet his influence continued to resonate through those he had taught and inspired. The following year the school formally joined the University of California system, becoming its Southern Branch in 1919. The transformation of the Los Angeles State Normal School into UCLA was a continuation of his work, the architectural and intellectual foundation upon which modern education in Los Angeles was built. Today, the site where Millspaugh Hall once stood forms part of the Los Angeles City College campus on North Vermont Avenue. Though the original hall was demolished in the 1960s, the ground retains the imprint of an early architecture of learning.

When he passed away in 1920, former students and faculty gathered to honor his life’s work. They spoke of him not only as an administrator but as an architect of moral thought, a builder of frameworks both tangible and unseen. His portrait, painted by William Cogswell in 1896 and once thought lost, was rediscovered years later in the sealed tower of Millspaugh Hall. Its return felt emblematic, a reminder that memory often survives quietly, awaiting recognition.

This document holds meaning beyond its historical record. The folds of a graduation program, like the grain of a walnut cabinet or the worn carving of a chair, preserve the gestures of their makers and the intentions of their age. To restore is not to erase the past but to allow it to continue. Just as a nineteenth-century settee can be renewed to live within a modern interior, this century-old program remains legible through the care that preserved it.

The last commencement of Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh marks both conclusion and passage. Within this fragile piece of paper endures a lineage of learning, shaped by proportion, judgment, and belief in continuity. The document closes, but the values it carries remain open, held in reserve for those who continue the work of preservation.