(Following is an expanded version of a memorial published in the Nov. 18, 2009, issue of PAW.)

Bill Selden died Sept. 21, 2009, at Pennswood Village in Newtown, Pa., where he had been a resident since 1993.

He was born Nov. 11, 1911, in Oil City, Pa., the youngest child of Edwin van D. Selden and Cornelia Earp Selden. His three older brothers and sister are all deceased.

Following his early education in the public schools of Oil City, Bill subsequently graduated from the Gilman School in Baltimore. After his graduation from Princeton University in 1934, he served in the University’s administration for several years and then in the administrations of Brown and Northwestern universities before assuming the presidency of Illinois College. Beginning in 1955 he was for 10 years the executive director of the National Commission on Accrediting in Washington, and then vice president of the American Assembly at Columbia University, at which time he moved to Princeton.

In the mid-1960s, Bill was asked to conduct studies in higher education for the New Jersey Department of Education and for the American Church Institute of the Protestant Episcopal Church. These assignments led to his resignation from the American Assembly and a series of appointments to national and regional boards and commissions concerned with education for the professions and the military services; in many cases he served as the chairman or the director of such studies. He also was appointed as an educational consultant in India, first by the U.S. Department of State and subsequently by the Danforth Foundation.

At the request of the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in the 1980s, Bill undertook writing a history of the founding of what is now the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. This led during the succeeding 25 years to his writing a series of monographs and histories of various institutions in Princeton. These included the Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton Day School, the Nassau Club, Drumthwacket (the New Jersey governor’s mansion), the Princeton Public Library, and various aspects of historical interest related to Princeton University and other educational institutions in the town.

Throughout his life Bill volunteered on many national boards and commissions concerned with both higher education and the professions. While living in Princeton he served on the borough council, was co-chairman of the Princeton Joint Municipal Consolidation Study Commission, was chairman of the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Long-Range Planning for the Princeton Public Schools, and was founding president of the Arts Council of Princeton.

Bill’s wife of 66 years, Virginia Barr Selden, died in 2004. He is survived by two sons and their wives, Edwin van D. Selden II and Deborah Holston Selden and Joseph Barr Selden and Joan Hanson Selden; his daughter, Beth Carol Selden Matyja, and her husband, Gregory Alan Matyja; and five grandchildren.

Undergraduate Class of 1934