Providing reflections on Prof. Vincent Tinto's South Africa lectures is an incredibly honour. Like countless other scholars and practitioners in the field of higher educatin administration, I have long relied on Tinto's work to provide a foundation for my own efforts to understand how to improve students' college-related outcomes. In his first lecture, Tinto reflects on the "flash of recognition" that occurred when he learned about Durkheim's theory of suicide. Similarly, I vividly remember reading the second edition of his book, Leaving College (University of Chicago Press), in my apartment in Ann Arbor when I was a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. The way that he used theory to inform his conceptual model of student departure was incredibly helpful to me, as I worked to understand how to conceptualise my dissertation study of the predictors of the choice of college that students attend. I am one of the many thousands who have cited this book — as well as many of Tinto's other incredibly useful publications — over the course of my career.