Do you all consider alumni initiations the same as honorary initiations or do you distinguish between the two? I was just wondering how that worked for others.

-Rudey

When APhiA had honorary membership (a practice we discontinued) there was definitely a difference between the two. Honorary membership was bestowed only on the national level (Hubert Humphrey is an honorary Alpha) while alumni initation is a fairly common practice for any man who already holds a college degree.

Now, "famous" people who want to be members have to seek Alpha through a chapter, period.

Judge Mathis is a Spring 04 initiate into an alumni chapter, FWIW.

I'm incredibly late in gettin in on this thread, but I wanted to take a minute to (again) confirm that Pi Kappa Phi does perform alumni initiations. I was recently initiated myself last December 9th into the Delta Lambda chapter at UNC-Charlotte. If you should have any specific questions please feel free to drop me an email and I'll make every attempt to answer them. Many fraternities and sororities initiate some of their best members through AI.

Best wishes,
Mike

So, yeah, this thread is incredibly old and AXiD670 has officially calle me a moron. So.... disregard. :)

I guess I can chime in on this too.

Our fraternity allows for chapters to include "special initiates" into our rituals. These are individuals (men only) who have contributed something of importance or merit to our chapter. For example. a year ago our Ritual Chairman was responsible for the construction and organization of our numerous ritual materials. His father, being handy with power tools, spent countless hours and $$ helping him build and transport everything. As a form of thank you and respect, we offered to initiate his father into our fraternity. He was given all the pledge materials to study and accepted our offer. He has an official roll number in our roll book. He's now our Ritual Advisor. So, I guess that could be a means for some guys to be involved with our fraternity long after they've exited school. Just a thought...

It's now been done twice in our chapter. However, I've been led to believe that this is still fairly rare.

My chapter is just an exceptional one, I guess ;)

I believe that Phi Kappa Tau does initiate graduates...they initiated my grandfather this past winter...poor guy's been a pledge for 50 some years ! :)