Hugh Culverhouse is a Miami-based investor who grew up in Alabama. In 2018, he donated $26.5 million to the University of Alabama’s law school—the largest gift in the history of the university. Over the course of a decade, Culverhouse donated over $40 million, making him by far the University of Alabama’s greatest patron. In recognition of his generosity, the president of UA renamed the law school after Culverhouse last September and issued a statement of praise for his gifts. That was then.
On Friday, the University of Alabama’s board of trustees voted to return Culverhouse’s gift and remove his name from the law school after he spoke out against the state’s new constitution-violating abortion law. The real estate developer had also encouraged businesses to join in a boycott of Alabama over the law that was passed with the explicit intent of attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade. Culverhouse responded with a statement that the action by the UA trustees was not unexpected, and he encouraged students to "reconsider their educational options in Alabama."
In a Washington Post editorial, Culverhouse said, “My love for Alabama is exactly why I was so horrified to watch its lawmakers trample over the Constitution last month. The ban on abortion they passed wasn’t just an attack against women, it was an affront to the rule of law itself. Part of being an American is engaging in public debate, and we can disagree over this issue. But the courts settled this matter a long time ago: Abortion is legal. So it was shocking to see legislators ignore this and pass a bill that turned women and health professionals into criminals, and it felt important to say so publicly.”
But the punishment that Culverhouse is getting for this is … no punishment at all. He’s getting his money back. The people being punished are the University of Alabama students who are being deprived of the facilities and staff that money would have supported; the students who will now have to open their own wallets, or take out more loans, to make up the difference.
And those law school students are also getting an explicit lesson—in Alabama, the First Amendment is less important than the war to take away rights from women.
Usually, it takes some careful accounting and efforts from nonpartisan organizations to determine the damage done to a state by actions like the execrable Alabama bill. But in this case, the numbers are not in dispute. University of Alabama trustees are more than willing to punish their students, and their state, by heaping a bad decision on an awful law.
“It has been painful to witness administrators at the university choose zealotry over the well-being of its own students,” wrote Culverhouse, “but it’s another example of the damage this attack on abortion rights will do to Alabama. The bill will not survive a court challenge, and likely will cost the state a great deal in court fees and other expenses that could be used to help its citizens.”
As with similar bills in Georgia and Missouri, the cost of the legislation isn’t just millions of dollars and thousands of jobs. The loss is in showing that Alabama is willing to destroy the investment and opportunities of everyone to support the radical actions of those who want to roll back decades of hard-won progress and endanger the lives of women across the state. Its the kind of decision that makes a state radioactive for prospective businesses for a long time.
The University of Alabama president has claimed that the money is being refunded over a dispute about how it was to be spent—a dispute that apparently was so obscure that they didn’t bother to tell Culverhouse. Hours after the vote by the trustees, the university sent workers out to chisel away the name of the law school. It was a lot more than a few letters they were cutting away.
Culverhouses’ father was a board member for Planned Parenthood. His name remains on the Univeristy of Alabama’s business school. For now.