They meet at seven in the morning because that was the only hour everyone could manage in 1998, and nobody has proposed changing it since.
The committee has outlasted four executive directors, three buildings and one near-bankruptcy that took two years to climb out of. Its membership turns over slowly and almost entirely by recommendation.
What it does, mostly, is say no. The institution it oversees receives far more proposals than it can fund, and the discipline of declining well is the committee’s actual work.
