NCF Alum Rob Bilott on the Tennants’ Land in West Virginia: A New College alum wages an 18-year battle against a chemical polluter.

Sarah Barlage calls her husband, Rob Bilott, “stubborn.” That’s an understatement. Bilott, a 50-year-old Cincinnati-based environmental attorney, has devoted the last 18 years of his life to proving that DuPont for decades used a chemical—perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA—even though the company knew it was poisoning the drinking water of thousands of people.
Bilott graduated from New College of Florida in 1987 and regularly vacations in Sarasota with his wife and three sons. When he entered New College, he says, his goal was to be a city planner.
“I was a political science major,” he says. “I tried to avoid anything that involved numbers and math. It was rather ironic that I ended up dealing with chemicals.” But he credits New College for instilling skills that equipped him well for battling the establishment. “They did a great job in teaching you how to think critically, how to analyze data, how to question what you’re seeing and look at it for yourself,” he says.