The development of an oath for business managers, similar to the Hippocratic Oath, has inspired meditation upon similar oaths for academics and university managers. Such oaths are concerned with formulating and asserting the professionalism of the groups that might take them. This paper argues that, while a legitimate heuristic to help university managers to understand their work and that of those they manage, oaths are an inappropriate device to apply to scholars. Scholars neither form, in important respects, a profession in the way implied by the uncontested professional status enjoyed by doctors, nor as a group aspire to such recognition. Examples drawn from history illustrate the suppressive and un-scholarly atmosphere that has been enforced by oaths.