Concord Law School announced that it is merging with Kaplan University. Both online institutions are already owned by the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, which is owned by the Washington Post Company.
But the new arrangement does have significant impact. Concord students will be eligible for Title IV student financial aid for the first time, including federal student loans and grants. It also brings Concord under the roof of a regionally accredited institution, which is considered more mainstream than the national accreditation Concord already had.
Concord’s new name will be the Concord Law School of Kaplan University. Even under the new arrangement, though, Concord law students will still not be eligible to take the bar exam in any state except California. —Dan Carnevale
14 Responses to Concord Law School Merges with Kaplan U.
mbelvadi - April 25, 2012 at 6:55 am
The idea that if you’re a native English speaker, you understand the language well enough to actually teach it to adult non-native speakers, is a misconception that has harmed students around the world. How often have you run into someone with not a lick of serious linguistic/ESL training who mentions that they “spent a year in Korea teaching English”? University administrators in the Middle East likewise seem to think that any white person from an Anglophone country is qualified to teach their students English, even if their resume includes no post-high school degrees at all.
dank48 - April 25, 2012 at 9:12 am
Damn right. Even with a German major and an English minor, I learned more about the English language by teaching it as a foreign language in Germany than I had on the other side of the desk. Among other things, it was a shock to learn that ESL focused on how people actually speak and write English and that so many of the “rules” I’d been taught were imaginary.
magyar - April 25, 2012 at 10:09 am
Csodálatos! I am now waiting for some tertiary responses from some of the people who comment on this blog….
alan_gunn - April 25, 2012 at 10:15 am
And yet nearly all children learn a language quite well by listening to speakers who aren’t experts in linguistics. Those Koreans learning English from volunteers probably aren’t all that much concerned with the intricacies of grammar. I suspect they want to be able to ask directions to the airport and understand the answer.
While it’s right that being good at using a language doesn’t mean one knows linguistics, I doubt that a knowledge of linguistics is needed to make someone a good language teacher. Not that courses in education are useful either.
Jack Hardy - April 25, 2012 at 10:36 am
I try to be nicer, though. People can get awfully sensitive about language. I’ve found that academics in fields other than linguistics can be quite set in their ways about their perceptions about language.
Nathaniel M. Campbell - April 25, 2012 at 11:47 am
I think you will find that this is true in many areas outside of the field of descriptive linguistics and prescriptive pedants, as well. For example, I recently witnessed a back-and-forth between a die-hard creationist, an atheistic scientist, and a person committed to theistic evolution.
The atheistic scientist excoriated (quite rightly, in my opinion) the creationist for not knowing what she was talking about when she said the evidence for evolution was easily disproven. Unfortunately, when the proponent of theistic evolution tried to proffer a truce between faith and science, the atheistic scientist started spouting complete nonsense about religion, to the effect that to be believe in religion entailed belief in young-earth creationism.
In other words, the behavior for which the scientist reproved the creationist (speaking from unfounded and assumed biases rather than from the established facts) seemed perfectly acceptable to the scientist when it came to his own unfounded and assumed biases about religion.
Edited, with a gracious nod to jffoster below, to clarify what I mistakenly wrote as “prescriptive linguistics”.
11182967 - April 25, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Campbell has it right. I suspect that we often take more pride in our limited knowledge of an area outside our own areas of expertise than we do in the much more extensive knowledge of the disciplines in which we have been educated. In part this occurs because we know enough in our areas of expertise to have a pretty good idea of how much there is to know that we don’t know, whereas our familiarity with the shallows of the area of dilletantism has not demonstrated the depths of our ignorance. I was a founding member of an association called the Society for Literature and Science. One national meeting was enough to drive me away: even coming from the literature side I was appalled at the casual manner in which the lit folks threw around terms like “uncertainty principle” and their devotion to such classics of science as The Tao of Physics.
On a lighter note, I suspect we also like the congratulations we often receive when we reveal that we know anything at all about something other than our specialty, especially in a “practical” area. My truck-driving brothers-in-law are amazed that I could wire my house, hang a door, and craft a cabinet–far more impressive in their view than my Ph.D. in literature. And I suck that up–and try to hide the fact that I never could learn to use that router up on the shelf.
yabba - April 25, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Semi-unfortunately, what linguists do is not all that necessary for people to learn languages and use them competently. Those untrained native speakers are the tip of the iceberg: most people who learn English in the world nowadays learn it from linguistically innocent non-native speakers.
What one can say with some confidence about all the different schools of language didactics is that none of them has turned out to be the magic method that works for all comers. The native – and largely inarticulate – language intelligence of the learners is much more important and in different people, this wants/responds to different kinds of stimuli. And therefore if you have a mixed bunch of learners, a hotchpotch of different strategies usually works best overall.
Grownup professional users of the language – writers and editors – are also often fairly clueless about the structures of the language they use, as chronicled by Pullum et al. And yet despite believing in some pretty silly rules and maxims, they by and large continue to produce quite reasonable books, newspapers and magazines.
Now this happens in other fields too. In medicine, the basic science has often spent more time discovering the physiological mechanisms behind drugs already in use than working the other way round, from a desired mechanism to a new drug. A lot of major drug families were simply discovered in times when people had a lot less qualms about the ethics of giving people new substances to try… so there’s one dimension in which science ought to be a little bit modest about its achievements.
Possibly a closer analogy to language acquisition would be the physics of football. There’s probably not much you could add to Lionel Messi’s skills by teaching him the mechanics of the ball and the grass and the wind and his muscles and bones. And yet, supposing he is getting on in his career and is developing a chronic problem with some joint or tendon: then the biomechanics people could very well suggest how to avoid overstraining the relevant part.
Equally, linguistics should be able to make specific useful contributions to practice:
1) Some language learners have more of a yen than others for learning things by understanding theory, so why not give them some? And there are some things you basically have to make explicit, because very few people will spontaneously develop an accurate feel for them: e.g. I can’t see many German speakers ever getting to grips with the verb marking of aspect in English unless someone explains how this function is achieved in the two languages. But the overall comparative teaching method is reputed to have been a failure.
2) Advanced users (writers and editors) should indeed benefit from the debunking of the bogus rules they tend to believe in. And I can’t help thinking they must also be able to improve their conscious skills by learning about syntax; about what makes sentences easier or harder to process; and about how we lay the thread of an argument through sentences and paragraphs to achieve what readers experience as a coherent story or argument, with the emphasis on the right things. For these things there are now pretty good linguistic explanations. But they are new – so new that they didn’t exist when many people now in the middle of their professional careers were learning their trade. It may take a generation or two for these things to catch on.
jffoster - April 25, 2012 at 2:43 pm
One note, Mr. Campbell. In your first sentence you refer to “…the field of prescriptive linguistics.” Probably this was a slip — we’ve all made em — and what you meant to say is descriptive linguistics . There is no field of “prescriptive linguistics”. Or. such a field would be oxymoronic if it did exist. .
Nathaniel M. Campbell - April 25, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for the note — in the rush of writing, I had condensed my intended meaning, which was along the lines of “descriptive linguistics and prescriptive pedants”.
Joel Crevier - April 25, 2012 at 3:14 pm
There is no “logical fallacy” involved in the assumption of excellent language speakers that they know how their language works. They are simply mistaken–as demonstrated by linguists. The form “If X, then Y” is not a logical fallacy. That an assumption is false does not make it a logical fallacy. For future reference, don’t use terms like “logical” or “logical fallacy” to prop up your prose or your argument unless you actually mean logical in a strict sense. Throwing things in like “if x, then y” gives your piece a semblance of sophistication it shouldn’t have.
yabba - April 25, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Here’s one for you:
http://spikedmath.com/445.html
hyunjungbae - April 27, 2012 at 9:35 am
As a non native speaker of English language, who teaches Social Psychology to Marketing major student in college, i believe the secondary education in the US contributes to the worst cases of the secondary and tertiary responses. Every semster, I have a student or two challenging the fairness of the questions in the quiz or an exam, arguing that it’s not how quiz questions are phrased thus it was confusing and it led them to choose a wrong answer. In earlier days of my teaching career, Id spend 20min on English grammar, thinking it was an opportunity to teach them something useful. After 19years, I save that 20min. for something more directly related to the class topic. Most interesting “tertiary” response was once posted on my evaluation; “she doesn’t even speak English good. She shoudnt of teaching”.the author of this observation graduated from a high school and had two years of college education by the time he came to my class. It is frightening to think that this student may go oversea to teach someone how to speak English.
dank48 - April 27, 2012 at 10:09 am
I think you’ve got it exactly right about “our familiarity with the shallows” that doesn’t show us “the depths of our ignorance.” People who know I’m in the book biz are amazed I can do anything else. And heaven knows there’s been all too much witless tarting up of the humanities with “uncertainty principle,” “incompleteness theorem,” “complexity,” etc.
And let me know when you’re ready for the router lessons. (It took me awhile to learn to use the damn thing, but I made new doors for the kitchen cabinets, and it’s a delight to hear how much other folks have had to pay to have theirs made.) Being a natural-born pedant, I have very reasonable rates for anyone willing to listen.