That seems to be very widespread, at least in the UK, because security (regardless of no. 4 in the fallacies of distributed computing). There may be different

That seems to be very widespread, at least in the UK, because security (regardless of no. 4 in the fallacies of distributed computing). There may be different setups for staff and students. You can probably at least use a free software client, though that may require extracting some configuration info from whatever proprietary one they distribute. I use openconnect when I have to use the Palo Alto GlobalProtect one, and it appears to be a better option than the proprietary one, judging by the continual problems and update churn I see. openconnect also works with recent network-manager on GNU/Linux. You may ignore the pushed configuration and only tunnel traffic for the campus net and use external DNS. [I once had to use the Cisco corporate VPN to evaluate the HPC gear they were trying to sell use, and was told as an HPC system manager that I had to get an MS Windows client to do that; sorry, no. From experience with a local old Cisco VPN elsewhere (use vpnc) I looked around for a solution and landed on openconnect then.]