West Point climate professor says he was fired for refusing to ‘defy science’
Kalkstein says he was suddenly ordered last year to cut from his curriculum information about the human causes of climate change, according to a new lawsuit filed against the U.S. Military Academy.
After 17 years of teaching science at West Point, Adam Kalkstein says he was suddenly ordered last year to cut from his curriculum information about the human causes of climate change, according to a new lawsuit filed against the U.S. Military Academy.
The change was immoral and potentially illegal, Kalkstein says he told Brig. Gen. Shane R. Reeves, who at the time was dean of West Point. Instead of upholding Army values, Kalkstein said he felt like a liar and a fraud.
Reeves stormed out of the room when Kalkstein declined a suggestion that he resign, according to the lawsuit. Six months later, the tenured professor was told his contract would not be renewed.
Filed in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit accuses West Point of breaking the law by violating Kalkstein’s First Amendment rights by forbidding him from teaching about human-driven climate change, an order that required him “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the course and to defy science,” according to the suit. Spokespeople for the Pentagon, West Point, and White House did not return requests for comment.
Michael Sussman, the lawyer for Kalkstein, said his client is a conservative Republican who believes the military needs to be taught the true causes of climate change when it comes to national security. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Kalkstein said understanding the causes of global warming was important not for social justice reasons but for things like competing with the Russians in the Arctic and knowing why sea ice was melting.
“He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,” Sussman said about the professor. “And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.”
Kalkstein’s lawsuit is the latest example of the Trump administration’s attempt to force conservative cultural changes on the education system. President Donald Trump has made frequent public statements dismissing scientific consensus on global warming, and his administration has categorized federal and international climate change programs as “woke, weaponized and wasteful spending” along with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and transgender policies.
The administration has repeatedly targeted the military for cultural change. Last year the administration banned hundreds of library books at the U.S. Naval Academy that did not align with Trump’s political agenda. Many of the books have since been returned, according to a Defense Department spokesperson.
In May, Judge Cathy Seibel of U.S. District Court in White Plains, New York, ruled in favor of another West Point professor, Tim Bakken, the longest-serving law professor in the military academy’s history, who had sued over the school’s new restriction on expressing his opinions to students in the classroom on subjects he teaches.
The latest lawsuit comes against the backdrop of a push by Hegseth to remake the service academies by dramatically scaling back the number of civilian professors and revising their curricula. A draft memo circulating inside the Pentagon this summer argued that the academies had been infected by “civilian academic norms” that were diluting the “focus on lethality.” The memo’s existence was first reported by CBS News.
The memo argued that tenure had led the academies to elevate the “research priorities of the tenured academics” over the needs of the military. The memo also called for “a comprehensive review” that would examine the “operational relevance” of all course offerings at the academies.
Hegseth in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, bashed the academies as “Marxist-adjacent” institutions and blamed civilian professors for the shift.
“Civilian professors were welcomed on campus for reasons of ‘diversity’ as well as expediency. And with them came the predictable, radical left-wing educational philosophies,” Hegseth wrote.
Critics of Hegseth’s view have maintained that the civilian professors have improved and broadened the quality of instruction at the academies at a time when winning wars requires agile thinkers.