“Right Now, I’m a Liar and a Fraud”: The Professor West Point Pushed Out Over Climate Science

On Monday, a federal lawsuit landed in the Southern District of New York with an unusual plaintiff: a self-described conservative Republican who taught climate science at West Point for more than seventeen years. Dr. Adam Kalkstein alleges that last September the U.S. Military Academy ordered its geography faculty to remove every mention of human-caused climate change from their courses, warned that the entire department would “likely be dissolved” if anyone talked to the press or politicians, and then declined to renew his contract after he objected — citing his “poor character and temperament.” The suit claims violations of his First Amendment and academic-freedom rights and asks for reinstatement to tenure, damages, and an injunction against what it calls “baseless restrictions” on a professor’s ability to represent the state of scientific knowledge. West Point says it is aware of the allegations and takes them seriously, and otherwise declines to comment. The allegations are just that — allegations — but they arrive with a paper trail, a Pentagon-wide policy backdrop, and a recent court ruling against the academy’s faculty speech rules.

What the Lawsuit Alleges

The complaint, filed against the academy and three administrators, describes a year-long squeeze. Each step below is as the lawsuit and Kalkstein’s attorney tell it — West Point has not yet responded in court:

• May 2025 — Col. Mark Read, Kalkstein’s department head, tells him his position is being eliminated in a workforce reduction. Kalkstein grows suspicious: the only other position cut belongs to a professor who taught classes on bias, and the academy is simultaneously opening a humanities center that would need more geography faculty.
• Summer 2025 — Kalkstein is told he can stay as a grant-funded “term employee” if he surrenders his tenure. He accepts.
• Sept 2025 — The geography program director calls an emergency meeting: faculty may no longer teach anthropogenic — human-caused — climate change, and a “clear threat” from Read is conveyed: if anyone goes “to the media, politicians, ect. (sic), the entire department would likely be dissolved.” Kalkstein repeatedly asks for the policy in writing; his attorney says nothing was ever put on paper.
• Sept 22, 2025 — Kalkstein writes to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stating the service academies have been given “a direct order to immediately cease teaching our students about human-caused climate change.” The letter, sent through the chain of command, never leaves West Point.
• Fall 2025 — Kalkstein complies in the classroom — at one point physically covering the word “anthropogenic” on figures taken from scientific articles — while protesting to the academy’s inspector general and legal office. His attempts to meet the dean, Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, are blocked.
• Nov 5, 2025 — At a department presentation to Reeves, after a colleague shows a PowerPoint affirming compliance with the directive, Kalkstein reads a statement: “We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them… 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 reacts angrily, suggests he resign, and storms out — again threatening the department, per the suit.
• Spring 2026 — Kalkstein finishes the semester, then teaches a meteorology course. At the end of the term, Read tells him his contract will not be renewed, citing “poor character and temperament” and the confrontation with Reeves — after what Kalkstein calls seventeen years of glowing evaluations.
• Aug 24, 2026 — Suit filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. Coverage begins August 26; West Point says only that it is aware of the allegations and takes them seriously.

Not the Plaintiff You Might Expect

Kalkstein’s attorney, Michael Sussman, makes a point of his client’s politics: a conservative Republican, and a scientist whose Sept. 22 letter to Hegseth accused the Biden administration of taking “exaggerated positions” that “politicized the field of climate science.” The letter does not argue that climate change is the nation’s gravest threat — it explicitly says research does not support that claim. What it argues is narrower, and cast entirely in military terms: that human-caused climate change has a “very real, very measurable, and very important impact on national security,” and that cadets cannot be prepared without studying it. “How can our country compete with the Russians in the Arctic if we ignore what’s causing the present-day melting?” he wrote. “Likewise, how can we prepare our assets along the coast if we don’t know what’s causing the seas to rise?” That framing — a Republican professor making a readiness argument, not an environmental one — is likely to be central to how the case is fought and how it is read politically.

Part of a Military-Wide Rollback

Whatever a court makes of Kalkstein’s account, it did not happen in isolation. The alleged classroom directive sits inside a documented, Pentagon-wide retreat from climate work under Defense Secretary Hegseth:

• In March 2025, Hegseth posted that the Defense Department “does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting,” and a March 17 directive ordered leaders to “remove all references to climate change and related subjects from mission statements,” while leaving room for weather risk assessments, environmental reviews, and base resilience work.
• The Pentagon canceled 91 studies on climate and social-science research (about $30 million) and proposed cutting $1.6 billion in what it called wasteful climate spending — after the prior administration sought roughly $5 billion for climate initiatives in its fiscal 2024 budget.
• The Army’s, Navy’s, Air Force’s, and Coast Guard’s climate action plans quietly disappeared from public websites, and the Pentagon’s climate resilience portal was shut down.
• Addressing hundreds of senior officers at Quantico on Sept. 30, 2025 — days after Kalkstein’s letter — Hegseth declared there would be “no more climate change worship” in the military.
• At the Naval Academy, nearly 400 library books were removed in April 2025 after Hegseth’s office ordered a review for material promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Kalkstein’s letter asserts the teaching order reached beyond West Point: that the U.S. service academies collectively were told to stop teaching human-caused climate change.

The backdrop the rollback is pushing against is measurable: more than 10,000 service members have been sidelined by heat-related illness since 2018, with the annual rate of heat exhaustion up 52% between 2020 and 2024; Hurricane Michael’s 2018 strike on Tyndall Air Force Base cost nearly $5 billion to repair; Typhoon Mawar’s 2023 hit on Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, nearly $10 billion; and the military has been deployed to more than 230 climate-related emergencies since 2022, according to the Center for Climate and Security.

West Point’s Second Speech Fight in a Year

Kalkstein’s is the second faculty speech case against the academy in twelve months. Tim Bakken, the longest-serving law professor in West Point’s history, sued in September 2025 over withdrawn library books, words and phrases struck from syllabi, eliminated courses, and rules requiring administrators’ approval before faculty published papers or spoke publicly. In May 2026, Judge Cathy Seibel — of the same district where Kalkstein filed — granted a preliminary injunction against the approval rules, and in late July the academy let the appeal deadline pass without contesting it. That precedent gives the new case an early complication for the defense: a federal court has already found reason to block this institution’s restrictions on what its professors may say.

Three Readings of the Case

The same complaint is being read three different ways.

The Left: the government is censoring science it finds inconvenient

On the left, the case is a straightforward story of ideological purge: a professor with seventeen years of strong evaluations loses his job within months of telling the dean that the academy was forcing him to deceive cadets. The New York Times headline — fired for refusing to “defy science” — captures the frame. The left points to the surrounding evidence as a pattern: the president calling the carbon footprint “the greatest con job ever perpetrated in the world,” $4 million stripped from Princeton’s climate research over “climate anxiety,” the deleted climate action plans, and a secretary of defense who calls climate work “crap.” To them, the threat to dissolve the department if anyone talked — and the alleged refusal to put the directive in writing — show an administration that knows the order cannot survive daylight, and the Bakken injunction shows the courts agreeing. Their core claim: this is viewpoint discrimination against settled science, and retaliation against the one professor who said so out loud.

The Right: the chain of command sets a military curriculum

On the right, West Point is not a civilian college and its classrooms are not a free-speech forum in the usual sense: it is a federal military academy whose curriculum the elected commander-in-chief and his appointees have every right to direct. The administration’s stated priorities are “training and warfighting,” not what Hegseth calls climate “worship”; cutting $1.6 billion in climate spending is presented as eliminating waste, not knowledge. The right also notes the non-climate explanations on the record: Read said the position elimination was a workforce reduction, and the non-renewal was for “poor character and temperament” — after Kalkstein publicly confronted the dean in a meeting. And they find an ally in an unexpected place: Kalkstein’s own letter concedes the climate field was politicized by the previous administration’s “exaggerated positions,” which is precisely the imbalance the right says it is correcting. Their core claim: cadets’ education should be set by accountable leaders, not tenured faculty, and a professor who calls himself a liar in front of the dean should not be surprised to be released.

The Center: a readiness question, fought on unfavorable legal ground

The center’s reading is pragmatic rather than ideological. The military’s own numbers — heat casualties up 52%, $15 billion in storm damage at two bases, 230-plus climate-driven deployments since 2022 — describe an operating environment that officers will command in whether or not the word “anthropogenic” is uttered. Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led the military response to Katrina, puts it this way: “You can change your policy to not consider the impact of global warming on your strategic posture, but … the heat will cause a disruption to global stability as well as security.” Erin Sikorsky of the Center for Climate and Security calls ignoring it “malpractice”; John Conger, a former Pentagon official, warns that “the Russians and the Chinese aren’t ignoring it.” Centrists also distinguish teaching about a contested topic from endorsing it — analysis is not advocacy — and note the academy’s weak tactical position: a prior injunction from the same district, an alleged no-paper-trail directive, and a plaintiff whose politics deprive the case of a partisan valence. Their core claim: whatever one thinks of climate policy, training future officers on a measurable operational reality is preparedness, not politics.

What Happens Next

The case is days old. West Point and the named administrators must respond in court; no hearings are on the calendar. Three things to watch: first, whether the alleged directive surfaces in writing during discovery — or whether, as Sussman says, it was never written down, which would shape both the evidence and the credibility fight. Second, whether faculty at the other service academies describe the same order, as Kalkstein’s letter claims. Third, whether the academy fights or folds, having declined to appeal the Bakken injunction last month. In the meantime, Kalkstein remains out of the classroom, and the climatology course he taught is, by his account, being taught without its central fact.

Sources

• Times Union — West Point sued for allegedly firing professor over climate change (Aug 26, 2026)
• Gothamist — West Point professor says he was pushed out for objecting to climate directive (Aug 27, 2026)
• The New York Times — West Point climate professor says he was fired for refusing to ‘defy science’ (Aug 26, 2026)
• The Seattle Times — syndicated coverage (Aug 27, 2026)
• Floodlight / The Invading Sea — Pentagon retreats from climate fight even as heat and storms slam troops (Oct 20, 2025)
• Associated Press — Naval Academy removes nearly 400 books in DEI purge (Apr 2, 2025)
• Inside Higher Ed — West Point declines to fight block on faculty gag order (Jul 30, 2026)
• Duke Law campus-speech tracker — Bakken v. U.S. Military Academy
• U.S. Military Academy — Adam J. Kalkstein faculty biography

Image credits: West Point 2024 graduation hat toss — U.S. Army photo by Christopher Hennen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.