To me that sounds like your school's sysadmin team is to blame, they don't seem to have figured out SSO. Both schools I've gone to (undergrad and graduate) had perfect Gapps integration, and both work perfectly in Chrome.
They have some other issues as well, the wireless is very difficult to connect to and the "program" that we had to download usually does not work. Android devices were not even supported at all until sometime in late 2013. The print queue is constantly frozen, and a few other problems I can't think of off the top of my head right now. All of this is strange because from what I understand the school has a decent computer science program but I was in humanities so I'm not sure.
