I know, I know.  I'm just a whiny professor who doesn't appreciate how the university "saves" money by spending it frivolously, but here's another problem with some of the "grants" received by USM.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that for 2004 "The University of Southern Mississippi spent $240,000 on two Washington lobbying firms and got $6.5-million in earmarks" ( http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i09/09a03201.htm  if you have a subscription). 

Those earmarks are non-competitive pork-barrel projects inserted anonymously into the US budget by congressional members.  No peer review, no analysis of the inherent worth of the project, no oversight, no accountability.  Now, I do happen to think that USM should pursue as many of these pork-barrel federally-funded projects as possible - Mississippi is in the top 5 states per capita receiving such money and all states and public institutions do it - BUT I do not think that individual professors should then be rewarded with additional money for something they did not apply for and played no role in securing.  To call earmarks "grants" is a joke.  What I do not know, and am hoping another poster can elaborate on, is which MIDAS recipients were actually working on earmark "grants"?

For more on the corruption inherent in earmarks and how they have become the norm in the past decade, see the latest Harper's Magazine (http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html).