Leading French university admits sheltering the Italian runaways (9)
I believe the answer is:
fugitives
'runaways' is the definition.
('fugitive' can be a synonym of 'runaway')
'leading french university admits sheltering the italian' is the wordplay.
'leading' indicates taking the first letters.
'admits' becomes 'gives' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'sheltering' is an insertion indicator.
'the' becomes 't' (the is pronounced as a 't' sound in some dialects).
'italian' becomes 'I' (abbreviation for Italian).
The first letters of 'french university' is 'fu'.
't'+'i'='ti'
'gives' enclosing 'ti' is 'gitives'.
'fu'+'gitives'='FUGITIVES'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Another definition for fugitives that I've seen is " Outlaws".)