An Expert on the Criminal Mind, Now He’s Suspected in an Arson Spree

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/us/gary-maynard-alexandra-souverneva.html

Interesting article, but a bit sensationalist. He received his PhD in CJ in 2013. He lectured as an Adjunct in a Sociology department. He appears to have only a few publications, mostly focused on the intersection of sociology and economics: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=gary+maynard+sociology&btnG=

Would you consider any PhD a de-facto expert in their field? I mean, I suppose I think of most PhD-holding economists as experts on the economy and most PhD-holding Clinical Psychologists as experts on the proper functioning of the human mind, but I don't consider most PhD-holding Social Workers experts at social work, I consider them just basically trained researchers. Ditto for a mathematician or computer scientist who is an expert in only one narrow sliver of their field.

Maybe this is because the closer a field is to my own, the easier it is to see the depth of that field.

 

I'm no longer subscribed to the New York Times, so the article is behind a paywall for me. I suspect the title was just something catchy and convenient. Whether someone can be considered an expert depends on the context of the conversation, in my opinion. If we have a physician and someone who failed high school biology arguing about COVID-19, then the physician would be considered the expert in this situation. But, in a more focused conversation, a physician who is a urologist or gynecologist wouldn't typically be an infectious disease expert. Criminologist has become a blanket term for anyone who conducts research in the criminology or criminal justice fields, but one of my professors uses "criminal justician" for those who don't focus on criminal behaviors. If you're someone who mostly conducts research on law enforcement training or how the court system operates, you're not really a criminologist because you don't study criminal and deviant behavior.

 

On the other hand, I've worked with many social workers and lawyers who knew an awful lot about "the criminal mind". The CJ degree certainly matters but it isn't the sole criterion.