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 have come to occupy an unconventional niche at the intersection of theory and practice in our field: my 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 led to the Gilliam Writers Group; as a second attempt, I am now forming an affiliated nonprofit. Ultimately (though not soon), I hope to leverage the connections and experience gained through these and future projects to found a school, and devote the rest of my career to building it up. 

As part of this adventure, I am now pursuing a three-year 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 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 offers a useful starting point for considering our purpose in this great endeavor, so that we can design institutions and curricula accordingly. What do we want for future generations, and how can 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 GWG on the structure of medieval guilds. I founded our company in September 2020 after months of research, during which I encountered the work of urban studies scholar Joel Kotkin on “neo-feudalism.” His unsettling juxtaposition of modern and feudal societies made me wish we had medieval trade guilds today. As he 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 soon realized, fertile soil for a new type of guild, 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 demographic composed entirely of skilled writers with teaching experience and literary training, who were nonetheless so financially troubled that news outlets regularly covered their protests. I was thinking, of course, of humanities graduate students and postdocs. Compelled by further research, 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 others interested in this kind of heterogeneous, historically informed thinking – the kind that drives all my own best work. Our writerly institution, so alive to the richness of humanity’s archive, continues to clarify and focus my passion for applying innovation to precedent. 

This brings me to the final value driving my career: 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 example, as owner of the Gilliam Writers Group, I ask every faculty member, no matter their training, to consult with a wide range of clients and students across multiple genres; in my view, If you cannot bring literature to life for an eight-year-old, if you cannot teach grammar to a middle schooler, then I cannot trust you to edit a novel or consult with a CEO on their speech. Over time, I have found again and again that intellectual versatility produces more competent specialists.

I first arrived at this conclusion during my undergraduate career, when a powerful but unfocused desire for self-determination led me to embrace hybridity almost by accident. I split my time between three universities, undertook two vocational gap years (some called the second one “dropping out”), and devoted myself to three complementary disciplines in two languages. Now, as a graduate student, my interests and the scope of my work are narrower, though still interdisciplinary: I have allied my study of philosophy and education to a secondary focus in linguistics. This work at Teachers College enriches my career outside the ivory tower, allowing me to participate more knowledgeably in the discourses that have shaped, and continue to shape, my field, as well as my niche within it: the teaching of writing and literature, of language. Step by step, I am building the intellectual and professional foundations necessary to become a responsible innovator in American education.

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