SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A Bay Area university has suspended all campus blood drives because of a long-standing government policy that bars gay men from donating blood, putting renewed attention on an issue that has been a sore spot at many liberal colleges.

San Jose State University President Don Kassing said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s position conflicts with the school’s policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

A campus employee brought the matter to Kassing’s attention last year, and school officials gathered information and spoke with the FDA before Kassing decided to discontinue on-campus blood drives until he is satisfied the agency reevaluates its stand, he said.

“I recognize the importance of giving blood and we know that universities are a significant source of blood,” Kassing wrote in an e-mail sent Tuesday to faculty, staff, students and alumni. “Our hope is that the FDA will revisit its deferral policy in a timely manner and we may soon be able to hold blood drives on this campus again.”

The American Red Cross and other national organizations that run blood drives have been pushing the FDA to revise its recommendation preventing them from accepting blood from men who have had sex with other men at any time since 1977.

The policy has been in place since 1983, when AIDS first emerged in the United States, and is meant to prevent the spread of HIV through transfusions. After studying the issue at the request of the Red Cross and other blood groups, the FDA in May decided to keep the policy in place.

People with past histories of intravenous drug use, prostitution, hemophilia, hepatitis or certain heart and lung diseases are subject to the same lifetime ban on giving, according to the FDA. Individuals are ruled out when they fill out a questionnaire that asks about medical histories and past behaviors.

People who have been treated for cancer, women who have sex with bisexual men and travelers who may have been exposed to the human form of mad cow disease by spending three months or more in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996 also are generally disqualified for periods ranging from one to five years.

“The persons who are deferred, this is not based at all upon judgment of their behaviors themselves. They are simply based on the mathematical model of risk,” said FDA spokeswoman Peper Long.

Student groups at colleges nationwide have occasionally boycotted or canceled campus blood drives because of the FDA’s policy on gay donors, but San Jose State associate vice president Larry Karr said the school does not know of any other university where the top administrator has instituted such a sweeping edict.

The Stanford Blood Center, a local blood bank based at the university’s medical school, released a statement calling the decision “a terribly misguided tactic that could have a devastating impact on the blood supply and, therefore, patients in our community.”

Dr. Celso Bianco, executive vice president of America’s Blood Centers, said the nation’s blood supply would take a substantial hit if other universities follow San Jose State’s lead. College-aged donors provided 16 percent to 20 percent of the blood collected in 2003, the last year for which statistics were available, according to the network of nonprofit community blood banks.

“Preventing people from donating blood does not help society, does not help patients and it does not change the system,” Bianco said. “I wish they were demonstrating. I wish they were sending letters to the FDA. I wish they were encouraging professors in the sociology department to engage in more studies of gay men so we can have better data.”