I'm a student worker in the IT department and UIC and we have an 802.1x wireless network for students and faculty to use, as well as a WPA2-Enterprise network we are supposedly "phasing in" that you can use if you know how to get on it, and we only officially support Windows XP/Vista/7, OSX 10.3-10.6, iPhone/iTouch, Windows Moble (not sure about 7), and recently Android 2.1 or higher, but not Linux. We do have people at the Helpdesk that know how to do it, but if not then you're SOL. That's not to say you can't get on the network, you just need to know the info, CA cert, inner auth, etc. UIC LUG/ACM hosts a webpage with a basic guide (I should know since I wrote it), and most of the Linux users don't have any problems with going this route, but usually when there is a problem it's because of the network manager app they are using. The nm-applet in gnome/lxde/xfde works but I've seem it fail terribly in KDE and there are some others that are just overly complicated, because of this I can see why offering support is complicated, but the IT guys in the OP are fucking morons. We have a lot of RHEL servers on campus and a large amount of IT people use linux. Trying to pass it off as a joke probably means they are either incompetent or 100% MS jockeys that wouldn't know anything about inter-polarity if you shoved it up their ass.