Similar article from stripes.com:

West Point professor fired after pushing back on limitations to teaching climate change, lawsuit says

• Rose Thayer

A civilian geography professor was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., for pushing back after department officials barred faculty from teaching that humans contribute to climate change, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

Adam Kalkstein, a climate scientist who spent 17 years teaching future Army officers, said he consistently received “outstanding” appraisals of his work. When leadership last year imposed a ban on teaching that humans contribute to climate change, he tried to comply but ultimately pushed back, saying that it was a disservice to the cadets’ education.

“It’s not a college-level course. It’s not even a high school course. Not because it isn’t rigorous; it is. But because we’re leaving out essential information,” Kalkstein said during a November 2025 meeting of the geography department with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then the dean of the academic board, according to the lawsuit.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein said.

The lawsuit called for a jury trial; to block West Point from imposing “baseless” restrictions on academic freedom; to reinstate Kalkstein to his tenured position; and to pay him monetary damages.

West Point said Wednesday its officials are “aware of the allegations and take such matters seriously.”

President Donald Trump has been outspoken against science that points to any human behaviors that contribute to climate change, such as burning fossil fuels. He told the U.N. General Assembly in September 2025 that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated by the world.”

Since his return to office, Trump has taken steps to roll back efforts of previous administrations to curb carbon emissions and incorporate more renewable or cleaner energy sources.

A portrait of Kalkstein.

Adam Kalkstein is a climate scientist who has spent 17 years teaching future Army officers. (U.S. Military Academy at West Point)

Kalkstein’s is the second lawsuit filed by a civilian teaching at West Point since the start of Trump’s second term as president. Tim Bakkan, a law professor, filed a lawsuit in September 2025 over the banning of some books and courses, which he said violated the First Amendment. That case is ongoing in the courts.

Michael Sussman, Kalkstein’s attorney, described the professor as a conservative man with no ideological perspective behind the federal lawsuit filed in the southern district of New York.

“There are certainly people who, anything Donald Trump does, they want to complain about it and scream and yell about it. He’s not that guy,” Sussman said. “He’s a person who has a great deal of dedication to West Point and the cadets.”

Kalkstein’s position at West Point first came under fire in May 2025, when he learned his tenured position would be terminated as part of a reduction in force. He was one of two civilian professors cut in the reduction, according to the lawsuit.

About 20% of the 500 faculty members at West Point are civilians, according to the lawsuit.

Simultaneously, West Point opened a new Center for the Humanities and specifically noted that more geographers were needed to staff it, adding fuel to Kalkstein’s growing suspicion that he was let go because of his expertise in climate change.

That summer the academy agreed to let Kalkstein remain at West Point as a “term employee” being paid with his grant money. He also had to agree to give up tenure in October 2025 and forfeit entitlement to a large severance package.

He had a roughly $750,000 external grant at the time to research the efficacy of weather systems to assist in troop protection, Sussman said.

The directive to ban human contributions to climate change first came up during a September 2025 meeting of the geography program, according to the lawsuit. At the time, he was teaching climatology.

“Learning how humans affect the atmosphere was a fundamental component of his course which he had been teaching for many years, and the concept that humans can alter Earth’s climate is a plainly established scientific fact,” according to the lawsuit.

Thinking of his colleagues who would have to pick up his courses if he quit, Kalkstein chose to stay under the new rules.

Then came the November meeting, where he voiced his concerns about lying to cadets by omitting information from their climatology course.

The dean responded to Kalkstein by reminding him that Trump, as commander in chief, sets the agenda for West Point. The meeting ended with the dean storming out, according to the lawsuit.

At the end of the spring semester, Kalkstein learned his contract would not be renewed. The justification was “poor character and temperament,” with the November meeting cited as evidence.

Throughout this time, Kalkstein tried to get a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth through his chain of command, but Sussman, who shared the letter with Stars and Stripes, said it never left campus.

The professor argued that exaggerated positions of climate change made under President Joe Biden politicized the field, “making it difficult to separate fact from fiction.”

“Despite this, we should not lose sight that human-induced climate change still has a very real, very measurable and very important impact on national security that should be studied closely by the Department of War and considered for both its present and future security implications,” Kalkstein wrote. “How can our country compete with the Russians in the Arctic if we ignore what’s causing the present-day melting?”

Complete Chuddification will ultimately destroy the pentagon