Selecman entered office during a difficult financial time for SMU and managed to put the university on sounder footing while expanding the campus and growing the enrollment.

[2] Selecman was a religious fundamentalist and opponent of secular education who banned dances, shuttered student groups he opposed, and fired faculty with whom he disagreed, including theologian and future Vanderbilt chancellor Harvie Branscomb.

The latter represented a small but vital current among faculty and moderate Methodist clergy, who became the targets of fundamentalists like Baptist preacher and Searchlight publisher J. Frank Norris.

[5] When Harvie Branscomb, a rising star on the faculty, expressed his public disapproval of what had happened to Workman in the Dallas Morning News, he was also immediately fired by Selecman.

[5] In another incident, Selecman engineered the removal of Joseph D. Doty, instructor and former Rhodes Scholar, for allowing two students to publish a joke about the president's "high-handed methods" and "big stick policy" in the yearbook.

[5] In 1932, Selecman, encouraged by English professor and notorious antisemite John O. Beaty, tried and failed twice to get Henry Nash Smith , who would later become "the most distinguished mind of the American Studies movement,"[10] to resign for writing the preface to a story by William Faulkner for the Texas Book Club.

[5] Though Selecman was widely disliked by faculty and students, he enjoyed the backing of the Dallas business community, thanks to his support of utilitarian education and college football.

[5] He was also a successful fundraiser—SMU's endowment grew from US$883,000 to US$2,300,000 during his term[12]—and prolific builder, growing the campus from two to seven buildings, including future landmarks like McFarlin Memorial Auditorium.

Meanwhile, he abetted an anti-intellectual reactionary—and later full-blown antisemitic conspiracy theorist—John O. Beaty, who created a campus uproar through his frantic efforts to fire a peer for his involvement in the publication of a Faulkner short story.

He felt that moral standards and a sense of right and wrong were nearly lost to his generation...In dealing with the faculty Selecman used high-handed and dictatorial methods, not unlike those of Mussolini.

"[5] Selecman's successor, Umphrey Lee, was a renowned Wesley scholar and advocate of the liberal arts who believed that SMU could rival universities like Vanderbilt and Duke.