The following declaration, originally written as a charge to new members of Harvard's Society of Fellows, is a thought-provoking statement of ideals for all those with the privilege of undertaking advanced academic pursuits:

You have been selected as a member of this society for your personal prospect of serious achievement in your chosen field, and your promise of notable contribution to knowledge and thought.  That promise you must redeem with your whole intellectual and moral force.

You will practice the virtues, and avoid the snares, of the scholar.  You will be courteous to your elders who have explored to the point from which you may advance; and helpful to your juniors who will progress farther by reason of your labors.  Your aim will be knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame.  You will not accept credit that is due to another, or harbor jealousy of an explorer who is more fortunate.

You will seek not a near but a distant objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you may have done.  All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.

To these things, in joining the Society of Fellows, you dedicate yourself.

by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1933, cited by Edward Tenner in Harvard Magazine v. 101, n. 2, p. 63 (November 1998).