“Thank you for the invitation” in academia is starting to feel like presumptuous snobbery. Pretentious. What about just an honest and private “thank you” ? Thanking publicly to the host (individuals, collectives and/or institutions) should not be the introduction to your invoked participation!
This “invitation concept” is wrongly applied when the majority of those occasions deal specifically with an “invocation” of some sort (surely epistemological, perhaps technical or even just an opinionated point of view). Considering a position without this initial proposition of status, hierarchy, superiority and privilege is not justifiable to the audience, to whom the invoked has the obligation to consider on a “equal degree of importance”.
Perhaps, if the “invited” part considered the true meaning of the participation itself beyond curriculum, peer pressure and faculty portfolio, some sort of a “deeper pedagogy” could appear and make “thank you for the invitation” obsolete.