In light of the Epstein files, should Bill Gates' name be on a building at University of Washington? by Marcus Harrison Green There's a specific kind of lie that powerful men tell when the walls start closing in: the minimizing lie, the "it wasn't what it looked like" lie, the "I was barely there" lie. Bill Gates tried that last one earlier this month, insisting his relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was limited to dinners. "It's factually true that I was only at dinners," Gates said. He claimed he "never met any women." The Epstein Files just proved otherwise—young women were present, and there are photos. According to some, no amount of philanthropic goodwill should erase that. But in Seattle, philanthropic goodwill has erased a lot. A name on a building is a command: suspend memory, smooth the sharp edges, turn biography into infrastructure, and controversy into cornerstone. It dares you to forget that the name above the door still belongs to someone who breathes, errs, and benefits from the power that placed it there. For years at the University of Washington, the Gates name has been exactly that: civic wallpaper. It crowns the Bill and Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science and Engineering in large letters, like a title for the simple story this city tells itself. Local boy becomes tech titan, tech titan becomes global humanitarian, city becomes beneficiary. Clean. Uncomplicated. Unquestioned. In the wake of the Epstein files, one 22-year-old journalism student couldn't let that story go unchallenged. Last week, UW student Jaya Parsons published an op-ed in The Daily, the university's student newspaper, calling for Gates' name to be removed from campus buildings. The headline was unambiguous—Bill Gates is in the Epstein files. UW should take his name off its buildings in response—and the message pointed. Gates' repeated appearances in the files, coupled with his admitted meetings with Epstein after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor, were "more than enough to make anyone uncomfortable to see Gates' name on their way to class." Parsons walked by the Bill and Melinda Gates Center everyday. The column landed like a match in dry grass because it named something that has been hovering at the edge of Seattle's civic life for years: the quiet bargain institutions make when a benefactor becomes too big to criticize. "I definitely did not expect as many people to see it as people did," Parsons told me over Zoom. Classmates and professors thanked her for saying what they had been thinking, a surprise. "I hadn’t really heard people talk about it," she said. "So I wanted to at least let people know that this is something that could be happening and maybe we should pay attention to it." UW did not respond to her two requests for comment.  She wasn't expecting demolition orders, just acknowledgement. "I mostly just wanted to hear why these buildings are named after him, and what we think about seeing his name every day." The university didn’t respond to The Stranger either.  Silence, in moments like this, becomes its own posture. Gates has not been accused of criminal conduct by any of Epstein's victims. But his explanations have shifted, narrowed, and widened again under pressure. Gates has buckled, if only a little. This week, in a town hall with Gates Foundation staff, he called his relationship with Epstein a "huge mistake," and apologized to employees for bringing foundation executives into contact with Epstein. But still he insisted "I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit." The problem is not that Gates has been charged with a crime. It’s that new disclosures are overtaking his lies: meetings around the globe, flights on Epstein's plane, the presence of young women at gatherings, and evolving acknowledgments about the scope of their contact. What was once framed as peripheral now appears more sustained, like a relationship between two fabulously wealthy men. What was described as trivial now reads as misjudged at best.  "If these buildings around campus were called the 'Jeffrey Epstein Library,'" Parsons wrote in The Daily, "they'd have hopefully been changed long ago." But we treat proximity to harm differently when the proximity comes with billions attached. Money is like duct tape over the mouth.  As of 2017, the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation had awarded UW more than 250 grants totaling nearly $1.25 billion. This philanthropy has been woven so deeply into the institution's financial and research infrastructure that the prospect of removing Gates' name is not simply a reputational concern. It is a reckoning with dependency. It is easier to leave the letters in place when Trump is a threat to higher education funding and the university has already faced layoffs tied to budget shortfalls. Staying in the good graces of a “good billionaire” is security. Tim Schwab, author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, has long argued that Gates’ philanthropy has discouraged scrutiny.  If this were only a matter of reputation, it would be confined to op-eds and campus debates. But the Gates Foundation is not merely a personal vehicle for his generosity; it is an $86 billion institution operating under a tax-advantaged status that effectively subsidizes its power with public dollars. That scale alone raises regulatory questions, precisely because philanthropy, as currently structured, enjoys massive public subsidy with comparatively minimal democratic oversight. But they’re not actually above scrutiny, legal or otherwise. So the question becomes: does anyone actually have the authority to hold it accountable? When I asked Washington Attorney General Nick Brown's office, Deputy Communications Director Mike Faulk responded bluntly: “We don’t speculate about our decision-making regarding any potential investigatory matters… If the question is just whether we have the authority to investigate nonprofits and charities, the answer is yes, state law does give us that kind of authority.” At UW, naming decisions sit with the Board of Regents, and policy allows for reconsideration in certain circumstances. Parsons doesn’t believe they’ll do anything. But she rejects the idea that raising the question is trivial or performative. "I think there's nothing wrong with caring about something like this. That's not some waste of time." For her, the point is not immediate victory; it is civic muscle. Universities are places where people are supposed to question power, not rehearse deference to it. Even if the name never comes down, she argues, asking why it’s there, and whether it still reflects the institution’s values, is exactly the kind of scrutiny higher education claims to teach. ...read more read less