Maybe OT: OpenSSH connection failure unless verbose

[Quartz]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask about this, but I can't 
seem to find an ssh-specific mailing list or web forum anywhere.

I have a bog standard setup between a laptop and a local university that 
uses a bog standard id_rsa key for password-less access; to the best of 
my knowledge there's nothing remotely unusual about the ssh 
configuration on the laptop (I'm less sure about the university server 
since I don't have access to its config).

About maybe 1/3 of the days I try to log into the server, the ssh 
connection hangs forever with no output.... UNLESS -v is specified on 
the command line, in which case it works totally fine. This is 
completely repeatable: no verbose, no worky (but only on bad days; on 
good days it works fine regardless). I've only ever experienced this 
problem with the connection to this one university, ssh otherwise works 
as expected connecting to every other machine.

Searching the web for info is worthless because the first thing 
everybody tells you to do when debugging a connection issue is enable 
verbose, which obviously doesn't help me here. Likewise, I can't even 
confirm if anyone else has even experienced this sort of failure before 
since searching for connection/failure/verbose related keywords yields 
nothing but self-help related noise. I have limited access to their 
server too- I don't have and can't get a password (it's key only), so I 
don't know where to even start figuring this out.

Any ideas?