[3][5] Selsam's master's thesis dealt with Baron d'Holbach,[1] and his dissertation concerned the English Hegelian philosopher Thomas Hill Green.
[4] In 1931, after receiving his PhD, Selsam served as an instructor and later as an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, where he worked for 10 years.
"[14][15] The political activities of Selsam and other Brooklyn College faculty members attracted the attention of governmental investigation.
[19] Circa 1941, Howard Selsam was one of the founders of the School for Democracy, an educational facility located at 13 Astor Place in New York[5][20] and associated with the Communist Party USA.
[20][21][22][23][24][25] In 1944, Selsam became the director of the Jefferson School of Social Science,[3][4][26] a "Marxist adult education facility"[27] whose faculty included "leftist academics dismissed from the City University of New York.
Even during the hey-day of Senator Joseph McCarthy's well publicized investigations into Communist subversion, the Jefferson School had an enrollment of 5,000 students each term.
[31] Due to tensions caused by the Cold War, Anti-communism, and McCarthyism, the Jefferson School was subject to Congressional hearings and Selsam and others received summons to testify on several occasions.
In addition, Selsam's books were translated into a variety of languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian, and Japanese.
He worked closely and collaborated with his wife Millicent Selsam, a botanist and high school teacher[34] who was well known as an author of science books for young people.