GULFPORT - The University of Southern Mississippi's standing as the largest university in the state could be in jeopardy because some students enrolled in a graduate class this fall shouldn't have been on the roster.

University officials said Wednesday they have been investigating a problem with the continuous enrollment policy for graduate students since early last month and said problems with student count were due to "human error."

"The error was in the way the policy was implemented," said Tim Hudson, provost for the Hattiesburg campus of Southern Miss. "It absolutely was not done with any harmful intention."

Hudson said he wasn't sure how enrollment would be affected because he didn't know how many students were on the original class list and how many weren't supposed to be on the roster.

The continuous enrollment policy is implemented by the director of the Office of Institutional Research, Susan Siltanen. Officials announced Wednesday in a news release that Siltanen had resigned as director because of the problems. She will continue to be a tenured faculty member.

Continuous enrollment refers to a school requirement that graduate students who have finished their course work but not their thesis or dissertation must enroll in at least one course each semester until they graduate.

Hudson said the policy has been in effect at Southern Miss for many years but has not been consistently enforced. Officials decided to enforce the policy this fall in order to collect tuition to help with expenses of running graduate school.

The problem occurred, Hudson said, when Siltanen did a computer query for graduate students. He said she did not ask for those who had completed course work but did not finish their dissertation or any other postgraduate work.

Once Siltanen got the list, she put the students in a graduate class but did not give it to college advisers for them to make sure the correct students were enrolled. Students also weren't informed that they had been enrolled in the course.

"It has also been discovered that because students were not notified by the university and thus did not pay tuition fees, many of them were automatically dropped from the system," the news release said.

"The original query did not identify the proper group of students that were not in compliance," Hudson said. "When you run an improper query and you get the wrong list, the problems compound from there."

But the president of a campus professors' group said Wednesday he does not believe the university's explanation.

"Putting people on a roster who have never enrolled in the university isn't human error," said Frank Glamser, president of the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors. "In the current climate of fear, it's hard to believe someone would pull a stunt like this without someone's blessing."

Glamser also said he has seen the roster for the class and it contained at least 700 names, but he didn't know exactly how many did not fit the criteria.

Phil Pepper, assistant commissioner of economic research with the state College Board, will help USM review its enrollment reporting process and the implementation of the continuous enrollment policy.

"We want to make sure that every number coming from our university, whether it is regarding enrollment, retention or graduation rates, is 100 percent accurate," USM President Shelby Thames said.

The official enrollment count is due to the College Board by Monday, and spokeswoman Pam Smith said USM must turn in its numbers by then.

"They've been asked to send them in, and we do expect to get a report next week," she said.