ABSTRACT
It hardly seems surprising that I can’t remember seriously contemplating attending any university other than the University of Toronto or that I should have gone on to become a professor. My family line includes professors going back four generations, most of the first three associated with the University of Toronto. A great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a classicist, a Protestant immigrant from Ireland who became the second president of the university. He even has a Toronto street named after him, although McCaul Street has been in a shabby, deteriorated downtown neighborhood for as long as I can remember. Both of my grandfathers were prominent professors at the University of Toronto. One was a classicist recruited from Oxford by McCaul, who married McCaul’s daughter, became Principal of University College, the largest liberal arts college, served briefly as acting president of the university, and has a building, Hutton House on the University College campus, named after him. My paternal grandfather, George Wrong, was the founder of the university’s history department and the creator of Canadian history as a scholarly discipline. He wrote the textbooks on Canadian and British history that were used for many years in the Ontario public schools. I remember as a small child tradespeople recalling this, not always fondly, and making the inevitable hackneyed jokes about the Wrong name.
