 That Selsam refused to testify at the hearings and faced contempt charges likely made his resignation unavoidable.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 and associated with the Communist Party USA.In 1944, Selsam became the director of the Jefferson School of Social Science, a "Marxist adult education facility" whose faculty included "leftist academics dismissed from the City University of New York."