West Point professor says he was ordered to cut human-caused climate change from his lessons. He refused and got fired: ‘Defy science’

A new lawsuit against the U.S. Military Academy says West Point barred Dr. Adam Kalkstein from teaching about human-driven climate change, according to The New York Times. The suit claims that the order violated his First Amendment rights and required him “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”

Dr. Kalkstein said he had taught science at the academy for 17 years before officials last year suddenly told him to drop the human causes of climate change from his lessons. The case was filed in the Southern District of New York.

He said he told the then-dean Brig. Gen. Shane R. Reeves that the change was immoral and potentially illegal and that it made him feel like a liar and a fraud instead of someone upholding Army values. The lawsuit said the general left the room after Dr. Kalkstein refused a suggestion that he resign. Six months later, it’s reported that the tenured professor was told his contract would not be renewed.

Lawsuit says teaching order required professor to defy science

Michael Sussman, the lawyer for Dr. Kalkstein, said his client is a conservative Republican. Sussman said the professor believes troops should learn the true causes of climate change because those facts matter for national security.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Dr. Kalkstein said knowing why the planet is warming is important for competing with Russia in the Arctic and for understanding why sea ice is melting, not for social justice reasons. “He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,” Mr. Sussman said. “And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.”

The New York Times described the suit as the latest example of the Trump administration trying to force conservative cultural changes onto education. The article said President Trump has often publicly dismissed the scientific consensus on global warming and that his administration has called federal and international climate programs “woke, weaponized and wasteful spending,” listing them with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and transgender policies.

The article said the administration has repeatedly targeted the military for those cultural changes. Last year, it reportedly banned hundreds of library books at the U.S. Naval Academy that it said did not fit Mr. Trump’s political agenda. A Defense Department spokesman said many of the books have since been returned. The administration’s political agenda has drawn criticism in other areas, such as when a House Democrat criticized Pete Hegseth’s testosterone plans.

In May, Judge Cathy Seibel of the U.S. District Court in White Plains, N.Y., ruled for Tim Bakken, the longest-serving law professor in West Point history. Bakken had sued over a new academy rule that limited how he could share his opinions with students in class on the subjects he teaches.

The Kalkstein case comes as Mr. Hegseth works to remake the service academies by cutting civilian professors and rewriting curricula, the article reported. A draft Pentagon memo from earlier this summer said “civilian academic norms” had infected the schools and were weakening the “focus on lethality.”

The memo said tenure had pushed the academies to favor the “research priorities of the tenured academics” over military needs. It also called for “a comprehensive review” of the “operational relevance” of every course.

In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Mr. Hegseth called the academies “Marxist-adjacent” and blamed civilian faculty 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,” he wrote.

Critics of that view have said civilian professors have improved and widened the quality of teaching at the academies because winning wars now requires agile thinkers. Efforts to reshape information have reached beyond the military, such as when the administration cut cyclospora research after a summer of outbreaks.