Instead of appealing directly to the Web Gods find an administrator or teacher that's willing to go to bat for you. You are insignificant and easy to say "no" to. A tenured full-professor is much harder for them to ignore. :-)

At larger universities, I think this is quite the opposite of reality. It is oft better to make friends with the web gods, join them, to get changes made. That's how Linux and IMAP became available at my college. Most improvements, in fact, have been from suggestions. Such large universities are probably using some very complicated mess to tie accounts together (AFS, etc), and have to contend with lots of security and reliability issues. Since your cgi-process can do many things (some of them worse than just runing your account space), they are wise to not allow it. Even "full tenured professors" are apt to be told "go run your own server", as the admins are right to do. Faculty might help in acquiring that server for you, though!

Our organization (campus ACM chapter) solved this problem of needing more sophisticated access by running our own server, just another Linux box in the office. From there, we could do just about whatever we wanted, but it took some doing to get a CNAME and to let the department serve up to us. In all, the whole deal worked out rather well.

You should really enjoy your campus web space. Using something for a local templating system before upload (as suggested above) can help you if you only have your web space to deal with.