Nine months ago, a Florida real estate mogul’s pledge to donate $26.5 million to the University of Alabama — the most generous gift in the school’s 188-year history — was announced with great enthusiasm and fanfare. On Friday, the money he had given so far — some $21.5 million — was unceremoniously returned via wire transfer and a campus work crew was removing the businessman’s name from the law school that had been named in his honor.
The unanimous vote Friday morning by the board of trustees to return the money that Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr., the real estate executive, had already given to the university was a bitter and dramatic conclusion to a relationship that included a dispute over how the money should be spent and a call to boycott the state school system because of a recently passed law that essentially bans abortions in Alabama.
In the months since the university announced Mr. Culverhouse’s donation, disagreements quickly emerged over how many students should be enrolled in the law school, which had been renamed the Hugh J. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law. Mr. Culverhouse also claimed that his gift was not being used for scholarships, as he reportedly intended.
But in the end, the dispute between the university and Mr. Culverhouse became a public and politicized controversy over the state’s new abortion law, with Mr. Culverhouse holding the passage of the sweeping measure against a law school that had nothing to do with it. It also became a prime example of how the recent wave of anti-abortion policies passed in the South has sucked observers on the sidelines into the controversy.
Mr. Culverhouse, a lawyer and prominent philanthropist, has publicly criticized how the funds he donated have been used. Late last month, he sent out a news release that called on students to carry out an enrollment boycott against the University of Alabama system, including its law school in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
While university officials maintained that Mr. Culverhouse was being too pushy with his administrative ideas for the school — declaring at one point that “Donors may not dictate University administration” — Mr. Culverhouse publicly laced into the law school, the state of Alabama and its new abortion measure. The bill was signed into law last month by Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, and bans abortions at every stage of pregnancy.
“As a lawyer, I cannot countenance a law school, especially one which bears my name, teaching state law that I believe to be wrong both constitutionally and morally,” Mr. Culverhouse, whose father once owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, said in a statement. “No accomplished law professor would join a law school which teaches law that is proudly unconstitutional.”
On Friday, after the board voted to return the money that Mr. Culverhouse had already given, some university officials and faculty at the law school — ranked 25th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report — said they were taken aback by the charge that they were somehow responsible for what had occurred at the Alabama Statehouse.
Alabama’s law school faculty are not alone in feeling that they are unjustly suffering the collateral damage from the ongoing abortion battles playing out across the country. In neighboring Georgia, some workers in the state’s burgeoning film and television industry have said they fear their livelihoods will suffer if Hollywood companies carry out threats to shun the state as a way to punish lawmakers for passing a strict anti-abortion bill.
Like the Alabama law, the Georgia legislation, signed last month by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has not taken effect. Although both measures face steep court challenges, abortion opponents have stated that they hope one of the laws, or others like it, will ignite a successful legal challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Stacey Abrams, a prominent Democrat and former Georgia candidate for governor, has been trying to convince Hollywood not to boycott the state, arguing that leaving Georgia would only harm rank-and-file industry workers. Instead, she has been trying to persuade Hollywood executives to put money behind candidates and groups that oppose the law.
In Alabama, top officials in the state’s university system have also pushed back at the idea that the squabble with their wealthy donor had anything to do with the abortion law. In a memo sent to the board of trustees the day before Mr. Culverhouse raised the issue of abortion, Finis E. St. John IV, the system chancellor, and Sid J. Trant, the board’s secretary and general counsel, said that Mr. Culverhouse had “complained about the law school’s administration” of his gift.
At one point, the memo said, Mr. Culverhouse had asked for the return of $10 million of the $21.5 million he had already given. The chancellor and board secretary recommended returning all of the money to Mr. Culverhouse and taking his name off the school.
Soon after Friday’s vote, Kellee Reinhart, a university system spokeswoman, issued a statement saying that the board’s decision was a “direct result of Mr. Culverhouse’s ongoing attempts to interfere in the operations of the Law School.”
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“That was the only reason the Board voted to remove his name and return his money,” she said in the statement. “Any attempt by Mr. Culverhouse to tie this action to any other issue is misleading and untrue.”
Mr. Culverhouse, who according to the ABA Journal earned degrees from the University of Florida and New York University and whose parents attended the University of Alabama and were active with Planned Parenthood, did not return several calls for comment on Friday. But he has been open and voluminous about his falling out with the school in the past.
At one point, he told the publication that the bad blood could have stemmed in part from him declining an offer to go to a football game. “I think what provoked them the most was when they asked me if I wanted to see a football game,” he said, “and I said no; I don’t like to see young men hurting themselves.”
