Reflections on Tinto's South Africa Lectures

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.