US university leaders have an “obligation” to lobby against proposed laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on college campuses, says the outgoing president of George Washington University.

In a podcast interview with Times Higher Education, Steven Knapp, who announced in early June that he will stand down as president of the institution next year, said that US university presidents have a “responsibility to speak out” against such policies, which impact “the atmosphere on our campus” and the ability to have “free and open debate”.

His comments come a fortnight after an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was fatally shot on campus. It is the latest in a string of recent campus shootings involving school and college students. Despite this outrage, from August a new law will prevent public colleges and universities in Texas from banning the concealed carrying of handguns on campus.

When asked whether university presidents could do more to prevent gun violence, Dr. Knapp said: “If something like that policy were to be proposed in Washington DC, which is where my university is located, or in fact the state of Virginia, where we have not only one of our campuses but a number of our teaching centres… I would certainly be very vocal in raising concerns about that.”

In a wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Knapp says the biggest challenge he has faced during his nine years heading the university has been managing the financial model of the institution, at a time when family incomes have stagnated but university costs have increased. He says that this has resulted in the university doubling the amount of student aid available for lower-income students to about $200 million (Rs.1,340 crore) a year — money that is generated from the tuition revenues from full fee-paying students.

Knapp adds that advances in technology have also contributed to increasing costs for universities. Computerisation has “added value by giving students more ways of gaining access to information and giving them more flexibility in how they can interact with the course material”, but it “hasn’t saved any money”, he says.