Earlier he had been a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and before that a staff director with the National War Labor Board.
[5] By 1939, he was at Cornell University again, working on a doctoral dissertation entitled "Development and present status of wage theory, with application to public policy".
[13] At that point, Hildebrand went on leave from the University of Texas in order to serve on the National War Labor Board.
[13] At first he was in Washington, D.C.[13] From March to June 1944, he was on a special technical committee to investigate and sometimes bitter public disputes surrounding the computation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics's cost-of-living index.
[4] Hildebrand was vociferously opposed to the actions of the university administration during the Willard Straight Hall takeover of April 1969, saying that "the administration has allowed effective discipline to collapse completely, and has yielded to violence and threats of violence, and has rewarded illegal acts.
"[4] Hildebrand believed that the purpose of the university was related to education and not to getting itself involved in controversial domestic or international issues.
[24][25] However, he thought that the United States should remain a fully-funding member of the ILO and seek to improve it from within,[25] a position that an editorial in the New York Times noted him taking and found agreement with.
[26] Hildebrand testified before the U.S. Congress in March 1971 that his delegation had improved the situation measurably, including in "persuading the officials of ILO and the presiding officers at its meeting to rule out of order polemics and political attacks on the United States.
[29][3] In doing so, he followed in the path of noted industrial relations scholars such as E. Wight Bakke, Neil W. Chamberlain, and George P.
[30] The latter of these included discussion of contemporary assessments from the likes of Milton Friedman, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and John Kenneth Galbraith.
[3] This was an entity funded by the John M. Olin Foundation and whose activities included having free market economics thinkers such as Milton Friedman visit the campus for seminars and conferences.