[bincat]

Does the university's workstations have publicly accessible ip? Do you have admin right to run vpn type of service on it? If so you can run OpenVPN in p2p mode (with no remote option it just listens on a given lport). All application traffic (rdp, freenix, tightvnc, etc) goes over the tunnel.

Mac http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick Windows http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html#late...

As far as the slowness is concerned it might be due to the software that you're using to look at the remote screen. I know tightvnc can go across cable modem type of isp connection well. But don't expect it to be superfast. UltraVNC is good too, but it's not interoperable with tightvnc and it is Windows only.