A Penn State University feminist club that has consistently drawn fire from conservatives over the last two years has managed to do so again — and in the process added fuel to a grassroots movement to cut off the school’s state funding.

Over the weekend of March 22-24, the student group Womyn’s Concerns and a coalition of other liberal campus clubs held a three-day Conference on Women’s Health and Wellness at the State College campus. Though the workshops on menstruation, contraception, abortion, homosexual Disney characters and bisexuality weren’t controversial — at least, not from a feminist standpoint — one really stood out.

Patrick Califia Rice was one of the other keynote speakers. Stories in Penn State’s online newspaper, the Digital Collegian, only carried reports of him speaking about his experience as a female-to-male transsexual — neglecting to mention that he is also the author of several books about lesbian sadomasochism and a champion of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which promotes the legalization of sex between men and boys.

That last fact was enough to raise the eyebrows of Penn State administrators, which has a developed a thick skin for negative publicity over the last two years. When informed of Califia Rice’s background by the Culture and Family Institute, Bill Mahon, director of the school’s Department of Public Information, called the groups hosting the event to make sure no one under 18 was allowed in—and said he “deeply regretted” their invitation to Califia Rice. Efforts to reach Womyn’s Concerns for comment were unfruitful. Digital Collegian reports did not say Califia Rice promoted pederasty during his speech, but they also left out basic news details such as how many people attended the event.

But, said Penn State news bureau manager Tysen Kendig, it’s not the administration’s job to police everything campus groups do — particularly when tax dollars are not part of the equation. The women’s health conference was funded with student activity fees — paid by all Penn State students and split equally among campus groups to do with as they please, he said.

“It’s not the role of the university to step in unless they step over the bounds of common decency and the law,” he told Boundless. “Common decency is a gray area, whether you’re on a campus or not. But it comes down to First Amendment rights. The bottom line is, these types of events, if they fall within the guidelines of the law, we’re not going to suppress them.”

According to the Culture and Family Institute, Penn State’s administrators, including President Graham Spanier, didn’t know anything about the event beforehand — which is not unusual for a school with multiple campuses and 81,000 students, Kendig said.

Should they have? Some people think so. Though the women’s health conference was co-sponsored by the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, the Women’s Studies Graduate Organization, the Penn State ACLU, a homosexual sorority called Lambda Delta Omega, Men Stopping Rape and another homosexual group called the Lambda Student Alliance, the central role played by Womyn’s Concerns should have been the reddest of flags.

It was Womyn’s Concerns, after all, that brought a bumper crop of bad publicity to the school last year. First there was the Nov. 18, 2000, festival given the name of a vulgar term for female genitalia, then the Feb. 3, 2001, Sex Faire, which featured games like “Orgasm Bingo” designed to help students become more comfortable using the taboo words written on the bingo cards. (Winners announced themselves by either shouting the word, “Orgasm!” or making orgasmic noises.) Another feature called the Tent of Consent, a sheeted-off corner of the room in which students were to be allowed two minutes of anything-goes consensual behavior (the only thing not allowed in the tent, according to a newspaper column last year by one of the organizers, was food), was never allowed to operate; administrators said it crossed the line between “speech” and “conduct.”

Led by Rep. John Lawless, R-Montgomery, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted last April to cut nearly $10,000 from Penn State’s appropriations budget, in part as a kind of censure for the events. In May, Spanier sent a letter to the university community asking campus clubs to “be mindful of the impact of our programs on the university and the community. . . . We have asked our Student Affairs staff to work more closely with student organizations in thinking through the complexities of this balance” between free speech and good taste.

Bill Devlin, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Urban Family Council, says Spanier isn’t showing accountable leadership by allowing such events to take place, and he’d like to see all taxpayer dollars withdrawn if they don’t stop. He’s also heard from people in all 67 Pennsylvania counties who’ve written Spanier, telling him they’re fed up with the liberal hijinks at the university.

“If they want to promote these social pathologies, let them do it on their own dime, not on the backs of the taxpayers of Pennsylvania,” Devlin told Boundless. “Would Graham Spanier say anything if the Al Qaeda Student Group invited Osama bin Laden as a keynote speaker? How far does the First Amendment go? Are Graham Spanier and the PR department going to say, ‘We think they’re showing poor judgment and we’ll ask them to do better next time’?

“How do they justify this to their donor base? It’s a taxpayer-supported university. Are they accountable to the people of Pennsylvania or not?”