While there has perhaps been a certain amount of politicization of the degree-granting process (same with other parts of academia, e.g., tenure), it's still a lot of work to get a degree, and the facts of a given language do not change according to modern fashions or politics (in a general sense, of course; new words may be coined or new constructions accepted, but particularly as concerns extinct languages, we can trust the written record as it is studied in classics programs, since these mechanisms of change have been in some sense suspended since there are no longer native speakers to drive innovation), so I would still trust a Latin Ph.D. to speak of things in his or her field. The fact that others might have some other opinion on the matter don't mean much in the grand scheme of things, in the same way that I might have an opinion on something outside of my field, but I defer to those with more knowledge and experience in that area to correct my impressions as necessary. We can't have worthwhile conversations if there is no authority placed in the process by which people may become experts in a given field just because others who haven't done the work to be so recognized might not understand why such things are important in the first place. There are many things I likewise don't understand, but to say "so what?" to them in response to the observations of people who do understand them only confirms my own ignorance, not that their observations don't matter.