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History
The Creed of Alpha Tau Omega
To bind men together in a brotherhood based upon
eternal and immutable principles, with a bond as strong as right itself and as
lasting as humanity; to know no North, no South, no East, no West, but to know
man as man, to teach that true men the world over should stand together and
contend for supremacy of good over evil; to teach, not politics, but morals;
to foster, not partisanship, but the recognition of true merit wherever found;
to have no narrower limits within which to work together for the elevation of
man than the outlines of the world: these were the thoughts and hopes
uppermost in the minds of the founders of the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity.
Otis Allen Glazebrook
1880
ATO Facts
- ATO was founded by Otis Allan Glazebrook, Erskine Mayo Ross and Alfred
Marshall, at the Virginia Military
Institute in 1865 upon Christian and brotherly love, with Christian
principles, not Greek principles, as the cornerstones of the values of ATO.
- ATO was not established in imitation of or in opposition to any existing
fraternity.
- The LeaderShape
Institute, Inc.was created in 1986 by Alpha Tau Omega, and today is
considered one of the nation's finest leadership skills training programs in the
country.
- ATO was honored by the Smithsonian Institute for innovative use of
technology with an award for Information
Technology in the field of Government and Non-Profit Organizations in June
1995. The award was given for ATO's innovative use of CompuServe as a
communications tool.
- ATO annually ranks among the top ten national fraternities for number of
chapters and total number of members. ATO has more than 258 active and inactive
chapters with more than 175,000 members and more than 6,000 undergraduate
members.
- The ATO Foundation provides more than $140,000 in annual
scholarships to members including scholarships to attend the LeaderShape
Institute, Inc.
- Alpha Tau Omega is a participating member in the National Interfraternity
Conference, the Fraternity Executives Association, the College Fraternity
Editors Association, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education,
FIPG, Inc., and the Fraternal Risk Management Trust.
- In 1950 Indiana University Worthy Master Robert Lollar created "Help Week"
setting the pledges to doing good deeds around campus and replacing the
traditional "Hell Week."
ATO Firsts
- ATO was the first fraternity founded after the Civil War in 1865, striving to heal the
wounds created by the devastating war and help reunite the North and
South.
- ATO was the first fraternity founded as a national fraternity, not a local or sectional
fellowship.
- The first meeting of ATO was at 114 E. Clay St. in Richmond, Virginia, where Glazebrook
read the Constitution of ATO to Marshall and Ross for the first
time.
- The first chapter north of the Mason - Dixon line, was chartered at the University of
Pennsylvania sixteen years after the founding of ATO, helping to bring a
realization to the founders' dreams.
- The ATO chapter at the University of the South (Sewanee) was the first of any fraternity
in the South to have a chapter house in 1880.
- ATO's first fraternity west of the Rockies and first of any fraternity in the
Northwest was at the University of Oregon with the chartering in
1882.
- Thomas Arkle Clark, the first initiate of the Gamma Zeta chapter at the University of
Illinois, was the nation's first college dean of men.
- The first World War I Medal of Honor was given to Captain C. L. Irwin, Wyoming '13, as one
of the first American heroes mentioned in dispatches to the U.S.
- ATO was the first national fraternity to start a chapter free of alcohol and tobacco on
fraternity property.
- ATO was the first national fraternity to sponsor and conduct coeducational leadership
conferences nationwide in 1992.
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