Arts & Sciences Magazine

By: Ashley Duong (COM`25)

Junior Ilana Keusch (CAS’24) was born a few months after HBO’s “The Wire,” premiered in 2002, but she had the opportunity to binge-watch the show during her sophomore year at the College of Arts & Sciences, when she enrolled in PO 313: “The Politics and Policy of HBO’s The Wire,” with Associate Professors of Political Science Katherine Einstein and David Glick. 

“My favorite part of the class was the way Professors Einstein and Glick integrated important themes in American public policy into the storyline of The Wire,” said Keusch, a BA-MA student in political science from Pinecrest, Florida. “There were definitely some more obvious connections, but the deeper connections were very interesting. I found the method of teaching about public policy issues through a popular TV show really interesting and engaging. And the predominantly lecture-based style of the class worked really well.”

“The Wire,” which aired through 2008, delved into issues like the war on drugs, urban elections, bureaucracy, the decline of American cities, and the complex relationships between City Hall and the housing projects, cops and crooks, educators and politicians, and the media, through the stories of a fictional drug kingpin, a troubled detective, an ambitious city counselor, and other characters. Since 2013, Einstein and Glick have been teaching politics and policies of American cities through the lens of the class. And while 20 years have passed since the show premiered, and 10 since the class was launched, the topics remain as pertinent as ever.

“The show came out 20 years ago, and it is still just as relevant if not more relevant today,” said Einstein. “I think the conditions in American cities that were really laid bare after the murder of George Floyd, really speak to the continuing relevance of better understanding police violence, inequality, and racism in cities.”

Einstein and Glick created “The Politics and Policy of HBO’s The Wire” because of their shared passion for the TV show, which focuses on a Baltimore drug-dealing operation through the perspective of both law enforcement and drug dealers and users. They realized it would be a great way to teach different social science concepts. The class is strengthened by their differing academic expertises — Einstein’s being urban politics and racial and ethnic politics, and Glick’s being political institutions, the bureaucracy, and law.

“We realized we could bring our own individual research expertise to come together and teach a class about a show that we really liked,” Einstein said. 

And they were right. Since the first year of the course, their classrooms have been full. In 2022, the first year they offered the class both semesters, the class was at its maximum capacity. There were 180 students in the spring, and 120 in the fall — an increase from their typical classroom size of 100, back in 2015. 

The class’s comprehensive coverage of political science concepts is different from a typical political science class, which often focuses on a singular subject for an entire semester.  Students in PO 313 spend one or two days on a singular topic, eventually tackling a wide range of different issues. Their typical homework assignments require students to watch episodes of The Wire at home, alongside reading various academic pieces, to discuss specific scenes and plotlines in class and how they relate to a larger political science theme.

Glick said the show provides, “a venue to generate student interest and excitement in … traditionally less exciting topics,” sparking more interest in the political concepts they teach. 

One PO 313 lecture, for instance, targets public school financing, utilizing season 4 of The Wire and its feature of poorly resourced schools. To collaboratively and holistically teach this, Einstein tackles the local resource allocation side — and how it’s a local inequality issue — while Glick explains the law perspective, focusing on the Supreme and state courts and their school financing case rulings. 

For PO 313, the programs typically revolve around local government, policy, and research: directly relating to the class’s content (albeit, not directly relating to The Wire, since the project takes place in Boston, not the show’s location of Baltimore).

“You see what’s going on in an urban neighborhood in Baltimore on the show and it just makes you inherently more interested in, like, listening to us lecture about how macrotrends have shaped economics in an old industrial city like Baltimore,” said Glick.

In recent years, the class has also been bringing politics and politics to life in another way—through hands-on projects in Greater Boston. Since 2022, Einstein and Glick have been partnering with the MetroBridge program, an experiential learning program that embeds real-world projects for municipalities and community organizations into courses at Boston University. Through MetroBridge, PO 313 students have the opportunity to see how the policies they research directly can affect the local community.  

“Adding in experiential projects like MetroBridge has allowed students to see how the concepts taught in class apply in the surrounding community,” said Einstein. 

“Students get to do applied policy work, gain some great experience, see how their classroom connects to the world outside the university and learn about local government,” added Glick.

The first MetroBridge project, in spring 2022, was with the Old Colony Planning Council, a governmental organization that assists in town and city planning. Students focused on creating inclusive community engagement proposals with a focus on reaching underrepresented communities. 

The most recent fall 2022 project had a similar city planning topic, where students helped the city explore public opinion about housing. Through hands-on research and analyzing residents’ viewpoints and comments, students help cities make sense of collected data and generate new ideas based on resident responses.

Dylan Giordano, a junior majoring in political science from Branford, Connecticut, was assigned Auburndale, MA, a small neighborhood within Newton, MA, for his project. His experience was, literally, hands on — as he physically went to the Auburndale Public Library and measured building heights for his project. He then looked at focus groups done by the city of Newton, alongside analyzing responses from the town residents themselves, and found that there was a communication breakdown.

“We were seeing a disconnect between what the actual political changes actually were, and what these people were responding with,” said Giordano. As the project’s conclusion, Giordano’s proposed solution to these communication and housing issues was the creation of a town social media page, “It would allow for two way communication from town to resident, from resident to town, so there would be less guesswork about what the city was actually doing,” said Giordano.

Einstein and Glick said their goal is for the class to be well equipped with a wide understanding of political concepts, while simultaneously providing them with a newfound analysis of how societal city politics are shaped. 

“I hope that students can take away how broader structural forces shaped the world in which we live and shaped the way that people behave,” Einstein said. “I think it can be really tempting, when individuals make bad decisions to sort of blame them and sometimes, they shouldn’t be blamed for doing bad things.”  

Giordano said his experience with the MetroBridge program taught him several lessons relating to the intersection of political science theory and applying it to real world situations. Besides the practice skills, he learned a core political science concept: that you cannot legislate outcomes, but instead, legislate political steps in order to achieve these outcomes.

“[I learned] how to take a breath of information, like what we got from those Newton surveys, and synthesize it down to core components,” he said. “Then takeaway the really key components of that information to better legislate means to a desired outcome.”

CAS PO 313: “The Politics and Policy of HBO’s The Wire” will be offered during the Summer 2023 Summer 1 term, taught by Shauna Shames, Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science.

Read a 2015 BU Today article about PO 313.