My occasional-when-necessary VPN solution: my desktop computer, in my Rice office, has a public-facing IP address and is running an ssh daemon. It's configured to only allow public-key authentication, so I'm pretty happy with the security story. ssh allows you to use the -D flag to create a SOCKS proxy. So, I'll just ssh to my desktop with the proxy enabled, then tweak the browser setting to use it, and then everything works.

If you don't have a handy machine like this, you could create one on the fly with Amazon EC2 or equivalent, which I'd trust far more than any of the VPN vendors. I'd probably trust that more than our campus's own Cisco-branded VPN gateway.