It may be blocked in your universities firewall, whois uses port 43 TCP by default.
Unless you can find a whois server that uses port 80 (depending on the firewall it may even block that) it might be best to use a web based whois service such as http://who.is/.
Perhaps test with another computer somewhere, if you can use telnet run:
deb:~# telnet whois.denic.de 43 Trying 81.91.170.6... Connected to whois.denic.de. Escape character is '^]'. % Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified