West Point sued for allegedly firing professor over climate change stance

More background on woke profs at West Point and how the academy is getting rid of wokeness.

By Roger Hannigan Gilson | Times-Union

A civilian geology professor is suing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, claiming his rights to free speech and academic freedom were violated when he was fired for pushing back on a directive prohibiting him from teaching cadets that humans are major contributors to climate change.

The professor, Adam Kalkstein, taught at the nation’s prominent Army officer training academy for more than 17 years before the institution did not renew his contract at the end of the academic year, according to his lawyer, Michael Sussman.

The school’s administration had insisted he remove all mention of humans’ role in climate change from his course on the subject. He begrudgingly followed the directive, but protested the change to the school’s administration.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenges the Trump administration’s views on climate change. President Donald J. Trump has called the concept of a carbon footprint “ the greatest con job ever perpetrated in the world” and has gone as far as stripping $4 million from Princeton University’s climate research department for giving students “climate anxiety.

The lawsuit was filed against West Point and three administrators who allegedly helped push Kalkstein out.

In May 2025, Kalkstein was told by Col. Mark Read, the professor’s department head, that his position was being eliminated as part of a workforce reduction, according to the lawsuit.

Though Read said the elimination had nothing to do with climate change, the lawsuit notes, Kalkstein was suspicious because the only other position eliminated was a professor who taught classes on bias, and West Point was in the midst of opening a humanities center that would require more geography professors.

However, Kalkstein was told that summer he could stay at the school as a “term employee” paid with grant money if he gave up his tenure, according to the lawsuit. He took the offer.

In September, the director of the geography program, who is not named in the lawsuit, called an emergency meeting, telling faculty they could no longer teach about anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, and conveyed a “clear threat” from Read “that if anyone went to the media, politicians, ect. (sic), the entire department would likely be dissolved,” according to the lawsuit.

Kalkstein complied but protested to the school’s inspector general and its legal department, and tried to meet with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, the school’s dean, to no avail, according to the lawsuit.

On Nov. 5, the geography department made a presentation to Reeves, with one of Kalkstein’s colleagues giving a PowerPoint affirming the alleged directive on climate change, according to the lawsuit. Kalkstein spoke up, saying the directive violates the academy’s mission and forces professors to hide scientific truth.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story,” Kalkstein is quoted as saying to Reeves in the lawsuit. “We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution. The guiding principle of any school should be the truth … I’m supposed to be an educator and a scientist upholding Army values, but, sir, right now, I’m a liar and a fraud.”

Reeves responded angrily and stormed out of the room after a tense exchange, according to the lawsuit.

Kalkstein finished out the semester, continuing to avoid mentioning anthropogenic causes of climate change, then taught a course in meteorology this spring.

At the end of the semester, Read told the professor the school was not renewing his contract because of his “poor character and temperament,” citing the incident with Reeves as a major reason, according to the lawsuit.

During an interview Tuesday, Sussman noted his client, Kalkstein, is a conservative Republican. (Yeah, right)

He also shared a letter Kalkstein wrote to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Sept. 22. In it, Kalkstein said former President Joe Biden politicized the climate change debate by taking “exaggerated positions,” but wrote that climate change was human-caused and needed to be studied for the country to maintain its military advantage.

“For example, how can our country compete with the Russians in the Arctic if we ignore what’s causing the present-day melting?” Kalkstein wrote. “Likewise, how can we prepare our assets along the coast if we don’t know what’s causing the seas to rise?”

Kalkstein attempted to get the letter to Hegseth through the chain of command, but it “never got out of West Point,” Sussman claimed.

The lawsuit seeks to enjoin West Point from “imposing or enforcing baseless restrictions on academic freedom and the capacity of a professor to fairly represent the state of scientific research and knowledge,” Kalkstein’s reinstatement as a tenured professor and monetary damages.

West Point, Read, or Reeves, who is now president of the University of Wyoming, responded to inquiries from the Times Union. Attempts to reach Steven Gillard, the school’s former superintendent, were unsuccessful.

West Point has been dealing with major changes related to Trump’s cultural policies in his second term. The month after he signed an executive order seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military, the academy disbanded a dozen cadet clubs, including the Latin Cultural Club and the National Society of Black Engineers Club. The Trump administration has also been sued over its ban on transgender troops.

The academy’s longest-serving professor also sued West Point in September 2025, claiming the institution withdrew books from the university library, eliminated words and phrases from syllabi, eliminated courses and threatened faculty members for speaking publicly or writing without administrators’ approval. The case has yet to be resolved.

First published on the Times-Union

From 2023:

Pentagon’s ‘Strategic Management Plan’ Devotes Roughly One Out Of Every Six Pages To Diversity, Climate Change

.@SECWAR “It is night and day—go talk to anybody who looked at SOUTHCOM. I was NOT JOKING when I talked about what the priorities were.

It was gender issues, climate change, and diversity. It was like USAID, but with some guns.” pic.twitter.com/mYfUa1IffU

— DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse) August 13, 2026