if the VPN works for 20 seconds and then stops then I'd suspect a smart campus firewall (you're on The Great LAN, I presume) - there's little you can do about that. OpenVPN does not "hide" itself from firewalls , so a modern firewall with deep packet inspection can easily see that it's openVPN traffic that is flowing over the SSH port instead of SSH traffic.
On the other hand, if you have SSH access then why not simply use that? Set up SSH on your home server, 'ssh' to it using port forwarding, e.g.
ssh -D 1080 <user>@<IP>
and then use either SOCKS support in your client apps or use 'socks-proxy' to run a VPN tunnel over the SSH tunnel .
