Gertrude Stein writes that the official "we" is always about forty years behind what is actually going on in the arts. In world literature also, the majority of the research on twentieth-century still cannot fit much in after the 1950s. In fact, one of the most significant challenges facing world literature studies today has always been "the contemporary". The history of contemporary literature's exclusion from the Persian literature programs is as long as the history of academic Persian literary studies itself. Since the early days of establishing the first modern institutions for studying Persian literature, such as Dār al-Mo'alemin-e Markazi (later called Dār al-Mo'alemin-e Āli) in 1929 and later the University of Tehran in 1934, early modern, modern and contemporary literature had a minimal share of the curricula. Over nine decades, conservative canonization movements led by the authorities of the field and their critical approach toward the notion of literary change have significantly impacted the Persian literature curriculum and scholarly research in Iranian universities. Academic critics of modern Persian poetry claim that, because of their anti-traditional nature and aesthetic immaturity, many modern and contemporary works could be potentially dangerous to the literary taste of the readers and, eventually, the sacred cultural heritage. However, one might argue that inculcating the so-called "good taste" through curriculums is not only an orientalist approach towards cultural production of the peripheral regions but also a way of promoting a dominant, hierarchical regime of evaluation which is to depoliticize academic literary research. In this presentation, I will argue that advocating for "good taste" leads to an approach that is to turn non-western literature into archival objects that must be preserved rather than developed. I will also analyze the strategies of three different generations of conservative academics to exclude modern and contemporary literature from the Department of Persian Language and Literature curricula from the 1920s to the 1960s.