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The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences has banned students, faculty, and staff from covering their faces on its three campuses in an effort to ensure public safety, a college spokesman said yesterday.

But the new policy has drawn flak from a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, which wants the school to exempt Muslim women who veil their faces for religious reasons.

“It’s a very strange policy,’’ said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. “I don’t know where it came from. The only thing we can conclude is that it’s designed to specifically target Muslims.’’

Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, called the policy “puzzling and possibly illegal.’’

Michael Ratty, a spokesman for the college, which has campuses in Boston, Worcester, and Manchester, N.H., said the rule was imposed after a “periodic assessment of public safety policies’’ at the private college.

“It’s no surprise that college safety has become a huge issue of importance in the past couple of years. This is another measure that public safety [officials at the college] wanted to implement to keep the campus safer,’’ Ratty said of the policy, which went into effect Jan. 1.

The ban applies to anything that covers the entire face. In addition to veils, that could include ski masks and scarfs drawn over the face, he said.

Ratty said college public safety officials want to be able to identify people who are in college buildings. He also said development of the policy had no connection to the arrest last year of a 2008 graduate of the school, Tarek Mehanna, on terrorism charges.

“Unequivocally, it has nothing to do with that case,’’ he said.

Ratty said that the college found two students who would be affected by the rule and that officials met with them and both agreed to comply with it. “We have faith that [the policy] is appropriate,’’ he said.

But Hooper said he had not heard of such a policy adopted at any other American school. And he argued that because the policy includes a medical exemption, it should also include a religious exemption.

“People should have the right to practice their faith as they see fit, not as others see fit,’’ he said.

Founded in 1823, the college says it has prepared more men and women for professional careers in pharmacy than any other academic institution in the world. It has 4,300 students in pharmacy and a variety of other health care programs.