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?”
Well thats just false. So many things want to be planted in the autumn so they can enjoy not so hot temps and come up vigorously next year. This includes most bulbs and wildflower seeds. 8ts going be be pretty zone dependent, but mid summer can be a good time to plant certain crops including some winter vegetables.
Sure, but why does American healthcare cost 2-5x what it does in other countries, esp. When our care is ranked 9th against them?
My point is it doesn't matter if what I'm paying is a "tax" or premium, I still have to pay it.
Why put a profiteer between people and access to medical care? How does that benefit society?
I have been thinking along similar lines, especially with respect to compensation rates. But I feel like hard caps run into a lot of issues especially over time. They entrench class divides unnecessarily. They should be adjusted to address local cost of living, inflation and probably some other things.
What if instead taxes on income (and assets) are based on a s-curve formula that keeps everyone's hourly rate (or total wealth) within 3x or 5x of everyone else? You work more hours, you still get more money.
The asset limits are so low that no can own a house. Asset limit should be at least 7x the top wage earners annual salary.
All of this assumes that no one needs to privately save for retirement, because food, shelter, housing, healthcare are already guaranteed. But there should also probably be a social security equivalent based on number of hours worked over your lifetime, regardless of compensation rate. Just make sure its funded as an investment, rather than immediately paying out from what's paid in.
The context was that the previous economic mode was feudalism, in which the wealth was centralized under nobles and monarchs. The governments that supported those economic systems were deemed too oppressive by their people and forced to change. But the economic mode when it changed to capitalism didn't differ that much in the long term. The wealth was redistributed initially to some extent with the changing of the government, but then reconcentrated into the hands of the few and then individuals were able to scale its extractive means globally.
The sentiment that forced the governments to change then was cooled by a change in system, and reality, but now we can see even more clearly that the issue is the concentration of wealth (and through it, power).
Now that we are back to a reality of inequality above previous levels (and we can see the outsize influence of the wealthy on every facet of policy), it is obvious that capitalism at this stage subverts the stated goals of democracy.
I have that same problem now, because my healthcare costs so much and I'm young and healthy! If only there was a cheaper way to pay for that like every other developed nation in the world does.
Those countries, to a one, have significantly restructured their governments or have been dissolved and reformed to a system that at least gives lip service to being controllable by the masses. They didnt do it out of benevolence, but because there would have been riots and revolution otherwise. The US is a good modern example of capitalism because it was born after capitalism had already been developed and was privledged enough to gain an upper hand, through investment of existing powers and colonial extractivism (also a key feature of capitalism).
As an example, 1838-The People’s Charter was drawn up for the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) by William Lovett and Francis Place.
The Charter had six demands:
• All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
• Voting should take place by secret ballot
• Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
• Constituencies should be of equal size
• Members of Parliament should be paid
• The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished
That is the enevitable end state of capitalism. It concentrates wealth upward and consolidates power in the hands of the few. You can tack on an external system of regulation, but eventually that power becomes so concentrated that those with power reshape those regulations to allow them to gain even more (and the ones at the top are greedy to a fault, its how they got there).
High taxes are fine if it means that I don't need a savings account to live. No need to save for retirement if my basic needs are met. Need being the operative word, it is important to still have the option at least until we can move to a post-scarcity gift economy, but I doubt we'd be ready for that in the next 250 years.
I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.
I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).
There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.
Capitalism's fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people's greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren't left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn't seem like a better option than continuing in the system.
One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don't have one, but we can build one.
If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).
Thats like saying its fine to pit maneuver someone for driving with a cellphone in their hand. Its not safe for the citizen or an appropriate response. The state should not put you in a situation where you are likely to break a limb or suffer a brain injury for a minor infraction.
Weird whattaboutism, but OK, I spend 40 hours a week of my life designing and planning national infrastructure improvements and when I am not doing that I am building and reinforcing my local communities.
Would be a shame if the people who align with their politics all adopted a poorly secured distro and got pwned.
Similar article from stripes.com:
West Point professor fired after pushing back on limitations to teaching climate change, lawsuit says
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?”
Well thats just false. So many things want to be planted in the autumn so they can enjoy not so hot temps and come up vigorously next year. This includes most bulbs and wildflower seeds. 8ts going be be pretty zone dependent, but mid summer can be a good time to plant certain crops including some winter vegetables.
So what makes that market free? Or is that just BS marketing?
Monopolies are the natural product of capitalism with inadequate regulation. Laissez faire (hands off) is a lack of regulation.
If government does nothing to prevent a negative outcome that it has a duty to stop, it is complicit.
Sure, but why does American healthcare cost 2-5x what it does in other countries, esp. When our care is ranked 9th against them?
My point is it doesn't matter if what I'm paying is a "tax" or premium, I still have to pay it. Why put a profiteer between people and access to medical care? How does that benefit society?
I have been thinking along similar lines, especially with respect to compensation rates. But I feel like hard caps run into a lot of issues especially over time. They entrench class divides unnecessarily. They should be adjusted to address local cost of living, inflation and probably some other things.
What if instead taxes on income (and assets) are based on a s-curve formula that keeps everyone's hourly rate (or total wealth) within 3x or 5x of everyone else? You work more hours, you still get more money.
The asset limits are so low that no can own a house. Asset limit should be at least 7x the top wage earners annual salary.
All of this assumes that no one needs to privately save for retirement, because food, shelter, housing, healthcare are already guaranteed. But there should also probably be a social security equivalent based on number of hours worked over your lifetime, regardless of compensation rate. Just make sure its funded as an investment, rather than immediately paying out from what's paid in.
The context was that the previous economic mode was feudalism, in which the wealth was centralized under nobles and monarchs. The governments that supported those economic systems were deemed too oppressive by their people and forced to change. But the economic mode when it changed to capitalism didn't differ that much in the long term. The wealth was redistributed initially to some extent with the changing of the government, but then reconcentrated into the hands of the few and then individuals were able to scale its extractive means globally.
The sentiment that forced the governments to change then was cooled by a change in system, and reality, but now we can see even more clearly that the issue is the concentration of wealth (and through it, power).
Now that we are back to a reality of inequality above previous levels (and we can see the outsize influence of the wealthy on every facet of policy), it is obvious that capitalism at this stage subverts the stated goals of democracy.
(Edited for tone)
I have that same problem now, because my healthcare costs so much and I'm young and healthy! If only there was a cheaper way to pay for that like every other developed nation in the world does.
Those countries, to a one, have significantly restructured their governments or have been dissolved and reformed to a system that at least gives lip service to being controllable by the masses. They didnt do it out of benevolence, but because there would have been riots and revolution otherwise. The US is a good modern example of capitalism because it was born after capitalism had already been developed and was privledged enough to gain an upper hand, through investment of existing powers and colonial extractivism (also a key feature of capitalism).
As an example, 1838-The People’s Charter was drawn up for the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) by William Lovett and Francis Place. The Charter had six demands: • All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage) • Voting should take place by secret ballot • Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years • Constituencies should be of equal size • Members of Parliament should be paid • The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished
Second example, The French Revolution
That is the enevitable end state of capitalism. It concentrates wealth upward and consolidates power in the hands of the few. You can tack on an external system of regulation, but eventually that power becomes so concentrated that those with power reshape those regulations to allow them to gain even more (and the ones at the top are greedy to a fault, its how they got there).
High taxes are fine if it means that I don't need a savings account to live. No need to save for retirement if my basic needs are met. Need being the operative word, it is important to still have the option at least until we can move to a post-scarcity gift economy, but I doubt we'd be ready for that in the next 250 years.
I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.
I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).
There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.
Capitalism's fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people's greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren't left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn't seem like a better option than continuing in the system.
One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don't have one, but we can build one.
If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).
To give a specific actionable practice, find a local public hobby meetup and go to it.
Joining a sea shanty sing-a-long at a local bar changed my life
This makes a mockery of every high minded value that capitalism claims and brings shame to every member of the US.
Socialism doesn't have to be centrally planned.
Thats like saying its fine to pit maneuver someone for driving with a cellphone in their hand. Its not safe for the citizen or an appropriate response. The state should not put you in a situation where you are likely to break a limb or suffer a brain injury for a minor infraction.
Weird whattaboutism, but OK, I spend 40 hours a week of my life designing and planning national infrastructure improvements and when I am not doing that I am building and reinforcing my local communities.
So what do landlords contribute to society?
You can't convince me that the Democratic party leadership is worthy of my trust. Depose them and they were can talk.