[1] Ackley was a member of the University of Michigan faculty for 43 years and served as chair of its economics department.

Upon returning to the university following his ambassadorship, he was named the Henry Carter Adams Professor of Political Economy.

[3][4] Ackley believed that government had a definite role in fine tuning the economy, using both fiscal and monetary intervention.

Johnson did not ask for a tax increase, and economists, including Paul Samuelson, believed this was the cause of the inflation of the 1970s.

[2] Ackley was the author of the popular graduate-level textbook Macroeconomic Theory, which was translated into several languages and remained the standard advanced text during the 1960s and early 1970s.