Dear prospective client or student,

First among these values is my conviction in the interdependence of educational practice and philosophical thought. In recent years, I’ve carved out an unconventional niche for myself at the intersection of theory and practice in our field: my life work consists of a two-part process in which I first design new learning programs and their supporting institutions, and then implement those designs in the real world, improving them through trial and error. The first phase of this process involves mainly research and writing; my plans emerge in dialogue with relevant scholarship, and I hold them accountable to that body of work during the hands-on experiment that follows. The second phase involves years of administrative labor, team building, and teaching; I express my designs as an incorporated business or nonprofit, which I then figure out how to run sustainably given the constraints at hand. My first attempt at this process has resulted in the Gilliam Writers Group. 

As part of this adventure, I am also pursuing a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, here in NYC [disclaimer]. My primary academic interest stems from my daily work as an educator and business owner: I am drawn to the subject of “enduring institutions” in education – institutions that tether individual learning to history’s longue durée. I want to spend my career investigating how and why these lasting organizations come to exist (and persist); the nature of their relationships with the societies that produce them; and their role in historical change. This interest serves my broader commitment to long-term thinking in education – thinking at the civilizational scale of history. I believe that viewing education as a project spanning centuries and even millennia can help us better understand our ultimate purpose as educators, so that we can design institutions and curricula accordingly. What do we really want for future generations, and how can our schools contribute? What might “school” look like in the next hundred or five-hundred years?

My graduate studies at Teachers College support me in pursuing this line of inquiry [disclaimer]. I am deeply inspired by my program’s unique relationship with the history of its own discipline, its longstanding role in advancing philosophy of education as both a modern field and a cherished intellectual heritage. The College’s ongoing stewardship of this heritage – a legacy spanning well over a century of American scholarship – epitomizes the value of long-term thinking that guides my own career. For me, this value is not abstract, but practical; for instance, I modeled some aspects of GWG on the structures and philosophies at play in medieval trade guilds. When I founded the company in September 2020 after months of research, I was immersed in the writings of urban studies scholar Joel Kotkin on “neo-feudalism.” Kotkin’s comparison of modern and feudal societies helped me realize that freelance workers today could benefit from some form of association similar to a medieval guild; as Kotkin explained, these institutions mitigated precarity in economies that barred most workers from financial independence – economies comparable, in increasingly unsettling ways, to our own.

At the time, I was supporting myself as an online writing tutor and editor in the ever-precarious “gig economy” – an economy that would be, I thought, fertile soil for a new type of guild, or something like it: a virtual collective that could offer bargaining power, plus a steady supply of clients, to freelancers like me. What’s more, I knew exactly where to focus my recruiting efforts: a growing class of underpaid workers composed entirely of skilled writers with teaching experience and elite literary training, many of whom were so financially troubled that news outlets regularly covered their protests. I was thinking, of course, of humanities graduate students and postdocs. Convinced by further research to act on my hunch, I designed the Gilliam Writers Group as a sort of guild for this social stratum, imagining that such an institution might, like its medieval predecessors, fill a systemic need effectively enough to stand the test of time. Since the company’s founding, I have tried to make it a haven for not only early-career academics, but for all writers and educators interested in the kind of creative, historically grounded thinking that drives our pedagogy. GWG’s faculty, so alive to the richness of humanity’s archive, continues to clarify and focus my passion for applying innovation to precedent. In other words, I’m very proud of what we do here.

This brings me to the final value driving my career in education: my belief in the importance of what I call “hybridity.” Hybridity is a way of thinking or being that centers difference. It suggests a kind of fortifying interdependence, the transformative cooperation of previously distant components. Hybridity, in other words, is adaptation. It is how we progress. Maybe that’s why innovation so often depends on collaboration across difference – across disciplines and age groups, across backgrounds and identities, and (perhaps most importantly) across the disparate elements of one’s own mind and personality. This concept inspires my approach to both scholarship and business. For instance, in my capacity as CEO of the Gilliam Writers Group, I ask every writer on our faculty, no matter their training, to consult with a wide range of clients and students across multiple genres; in my view, a so-called “intellectual” who isn’t interested in bringing literature to life for an eight-year-old, or in teaching grammar to a middle schooler, should not be trusted to edit an author’s latest novel or collaborate with a politician on their upcoming speech. Over time, I have discovered again and again that cognitive and emotional versatility produce more competent specialists.

This struck me for the first time during my undergraduate career, when a powerful but unfocused desire for self-determination led me to begin experimenting with hybridity almost by accident. I divided my time between three different universities, where I devoted myself to three complementary disciplines in two languages. I also undertook two vocational gap years (some called the second one “dropping out”). My six-year college experience was highly enriching, if a bit unfocused from an academic perspective. Now, as a graduate student, the scope of my studies is narrower, though still interdisciplinary: I supplement my study of educational philosophy with a secondary focus in linguistics. My research at Teachers College has already done wonders for my work outside the ivory tower, allowing me to participate more knowledgeably in the discourses that have shaped, and continue to shape, education, as well as my niche within this field: the teaching of writing and literature, of language. Step by step, I’m building the intellectual and professional foundations I need to become a responsible innovator.

Thank you for reading my letter! If you’d like to connect, or you’re interested in learning more about the Gilliam Writers Group, I invite you to get in touch by clicking the button below.

Warmly,

Brady Gilliam