Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, declared defeat late Monday as it became clear that his weeklong campaign to force Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign had failed. Harvard’s governing board announced on Tuesday morning that it stood firmly behind its leader, though it added that her response to the Hamas terror attacks on Israel had fallen short.

It was the end, at least at Harvard, to a stunning saga that has rocked the academic world in recent days. Suddenly, several Ivy League institutions have found themselves on the receiving end of tactics developed and routinely used by Wall Street’s top activist investors — a hard-charging category of hedge-funders who acquire shares in a company and then typically try to change the management and corporate strategy through an unrelenting pressure campaign. Previously, those measures had been deployed only against large, publicly traded companies. Ackman, an activist investor and founder of the hedge fund Pershing Square, has a well-known playbook for pressure campaigns and attempting to oust CEOs, having built much of his reputation — and wealth — by using aggressive public messaging to increase the value of his big investments. A notable success in doing so was a long position in Wendy’s that resulted in a large profitwhen he browbeat the company into a spinoff of Tim Hortons. It doesn’t always work, of course: A big bet against Herbalife — he went to extraordinary lengths to argue that the supplements company was an illegal pyramid scheme — resulted in a loss for Ackman of an estimated $500 million.

And at the University of Pennsylvania, the campaign — in which Ackman was joined in his criticism by high-profile financiers and donors including Marc Rowan, CEO of the large private-equity group Apollo — worked as intended, resulting in the resignation this past weekend of the school’s president, Liz Magill.

But Harvard, of course, was a failure for Ackman and those same activist methods. His inability to oust Gay now looks like a lesson in the limitations of an activist campaign in the academic world, outside its usual confines in public markets. There, the tactic has a reasonably high rate of success in the hands of someone like Ackman, who is able to appeal to other stockholders on a purely financial basis: Vote with me, an investor says, and we will all get richer. But a university has no stock price. Instead of shareholders, it has an array of stakeholders, including alumni, students, and faculty. At least for an immensely wealthy institution like Harvard, their concerns for the university’s future are not primarily tied to a financial outcome but rather centered on how its actions reflect their personal values and feelings and affect the school’s overall reputation.

Harvard, then, had to weigh the risk that firing Gay — its first female Black president — wouldn’t be received well by those communities, especially when the person spearheading the firing campaign was an icon of the capitalist one percent. Some on Wall Street grasped this........

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