A big-money, pro-abortion bully is taking it on the chin after he was caught lying in a dispute with the University of Alabama. At this point in the saga, it’s hard to think of anyone more deserving.
Hugh Culverhouse Jr.’s late father, an Alabama native, was a wildly successful lawyer and real estate investor best known for being the founding owner of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was a generous philanthropist who made a $10 million gift to the University of Alabama.
The junior Culverhouse seemed to be following his father’s footsteps when he pledged $26.5 million to the school in return for having the university’s law school named after himself. In the last two weeks, though, a public brouhaha erupted in which Culverhouse urged people to boycott the college in protest at Alabama’s strict new anti-abortion law. The school’s trustees decided to return at least $21.5 million to him and remove his name from the law school. This was interpreted by some as a reaction.
Culverhouse then wrote a column in the Washington Post in which he castigated college officials, who he said “choose zealotry over the well-being of its own students. … [A]dministrators have sent a message to young women that their agency is not respected or valued.”
But from the beginning, Culverhouse’s actions looked strange. Why urge a boycott of the university to protest a law that the university had nothing to do with? He worked very hard to make it sound like the trustees were sending the money back as a sign of their own support for the stringent anti-abortion law, and he tried to claim the moral high ground against a state law he characterized as “an act of oppression.”
But it turns out Culverhouse is, to put it very kindly, fudging the truth. It turns out his dispute with university officials predated the abortion controversy. After he pledged the money, without any explicit strings attached, he began trying to dictate policy to school administrators.
Kyle Whitmire, an outspokenly liberal columnist for the al.com newspapers who has been critical of Alabama’s abortion law, explained: “The university has now released email exchanges between Culverhouse and university officials showing the dispute as something else entirely — a bitter, personal feud between the University and one of the institution’s biggest donors. Those emails show Culverhouse trying to influence hiring decisions, admissions and scholarships.”
He continued: “Those records show Chancellor Finis St. John first told trustee Joe Espy that the university should refund all of Culverhouse’s donations and un-rename the law school after Culverhouse — four days before Culverhouse made any publicly reported comments about the abortion ban. Further, those records show Culverhouse mocking trustees, the university president and the law school dean, threatening to pull his money from the university unless those officials treated him with more deference, and eventually demanding at least $10 million back from the school. Again, this all occurred before Culverhouse had said a word in the press about Alabama’s abortion law.”
In short, the administration wanted to maintain the law school’s academic independence and integrity, while Culverhouse threatened to take his money back if the school didn’t obey him. The university rightly called his bluff. Abortion was always a red herring.
To be clear, this is not a matter of a school reneging on its agreement with a donor. If a philanthropist wants conditions placed on his gift, and the school agrees in writing to those conditions beforehand, then donor intent should always prevail. But if a donor pompously tries to throw his weight around after the fact, making demands to which the university never agreed as a condition of accepting the donation, that’s a different matter entirely.
Culverhouse apparently didn’t count on the university realizing his money wasn’t worth the price of dealing with him.
