Ongoing mortality ...

... the death of the reader. (Hat tip, Maxine Clarke.)

I have been meaning to weigh in on this business about ' the dearth of "expert evaluative critics" from academia.' The soundest form of academic criticism is textual criticism, which really does demand some expertise. Getting an accurate text of Chaucer is important.
As for the rest, the most important thing it seems to me that you need for sound criticism is the ability to read accurately what a text says. Follow that up with some clear thinking and you're pretty much home free.
But the preoccupation these days with the evaluative dimension - "two thumbs up!" - often has people going off making judgments solely grounded in their feelings about and impressions of what they have read. A while back, around when I reviewed J.M Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, I happened to come upon someone online denouncing me in no uncertain terms as the literary equivalent of a bounder and a cad because of this stupid observation I made:
"The highest intelligences are soon bored, therefore the soonest bored possess the highest intelligence. " Does he - or does Coetzee - really expect us to believe that a brilliant and sensitive "celebrity writer" would commit such an elementary error in logic ("all men are animals" obviously does not correctly convert into "all animals are men")?

I at least did Coetzee the courtesy of taking what he said seriously enough to point out that it can't be taken seriously. I could have done the same with what Señor C has to say about Bach as well. It's pure boilerplate. If he really knew Bach's music, he would say something specific - even something as simple as pointing out how the opening prelude in Book No.1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier brilliantly gives the impression of triplets without actually having any. But no. Bach is a touchstone of intellectual sensitivity, so vague praise must be given to him - not for Bach's sake, but simply in order to demonstrate what a sensitive intellectual Señor C is.
I mention all this only to point out that my criticism of Coetzee's novel was not grounded in how I felt about it, but in what I had observed of the text. Observe that text closely enough and, I believe, you will observe a third-rate novel.
I don't think you have to get a Ph.D. to be a good critic of literature. You have to be able to read, and to think - and the more widely you have done both the better.