By Harvard University is offering a history course this spring that allows undergraduate students to earn academic credit while contributing research and writing directly to real asylum cases — a move critics say underscores how elite universities have blurred the line between scholarship and political advocacy even as they receive billions in federal funding.
The course, listed as HIST 123: Immigrant Justice Lab, is taught by Professor Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof in the Department of History. According to Harvard’s official course description on my.harvard.edu, it “trains and supports teams of undergraduates to contribute research and writing for asylum applicants represented by attorneys at the Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice.”
The class operates on multiple tracks. One provides basic training in asylum law. Another involves collaborative planning, research, writing, and editing focused on the history of the societies from which asylum seekers have fled, with students divided into teams and assigned cases. Additional tracks address the ethics of legal advocacy and building partnerships with community-based organizations.
The Harvard History department has a class where undergrads just help fill out asylum applications for illegal aliens: pic.twitter.com/R0mPYxvF1Y
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) February 15, 2026
The Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice, a pro bono legal services organization based in Boston, focuses on representing asylum-seeking families, including those who have faced separation, family detention, or expedited removal processes, explained Natalie Winters.
Harvard’s Latin American & Caribbean History program has previously described similar efforts, noting that students put their research and writing skills to work on actual asylum cases, often in collaboration with legal partners.
Supporters describe such programs as engaged scholarship—a way to apply academic skills to humanitarian concerns. Critics, however, argue that awarding academic credit for work designed to strengthen one side of active immigration proceedings amounts to institutionalized advocacy masquerading as neutral inquiry.
And Harvard is not alone.
At the University of Michigan, the Immigrant Justice Lab organizes law students and undergraduates to research and draft materials, such as briefs supporting asylum claims in partnership with organizations like the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. The University of Denver’s Korbel Asylum Project similarly involves students in producing human rights research, including country-conditions reports, to support pro bono attorneys handling asylum cases.
Taken together, the programs reflect a broader shift within elite higher education: universities positioning themselves not merely as places of study, but as active participants in contested political and legal battles.
The development comes amid heightened scrutiny of Harvard’s federal funding and governance. The university receives billions of dollars annually in federal grants and research support. Yet recent controversies have intensified debate over whether such institutions continue to serve the public interest.
In 2025, reports detailed a standoff between Harvard and the Trump administration over Title IX enforcement, as federal officials pressed universities to address alleged failures to protect female athletes and properly respond to campus misconduct. When confronted with potential civil rights penalties, the university warned it might euthanize research animals rather than comply with certain federal demands. The clash underscored mounting tensions between elite institutions and a White House increasingly willing to leverage federal funding to force policy changes.
Elite universities long justified generous federal support on the grounds that they advanced neutral scholarship, scientific innovation, and the broad public good. Increasingly, detractors argue, they have adopted leftwing ideological missions that align with one side of deeply divisive national debates.
Whether programs like Harvard’s Immigrant Justice Lab represent civic engagement or academic mission drift may ultimately depend on one’s view of the university’s role in American life. What is clear is that the boundary between classroom and courtroom—between study and activism—is growing thinner. Liberal academics can no longer hide that they use tax money to fund their own attempts to, in the words of Barack Obama, “fundamentally transform America.”
And as federal dollars continue to flow, there’s really one question left: why hasn’t the White House put a stop to it?
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