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.