The issue with timers and cold lights is called "inductive load" which is higher for cold lights than for incandescent bulbs. Unfortunately my background is math, not electrical engineering, so I don't know exactly what inductive load is
. However, there was a post on the APUG site which said that ZoneVi stabilized heads (i.e. the electronics built into the VC head) did not have a big "inductive kick" so that most timers would be fine. In any case, the danger is not to the cold light, it is to the timer. I suspect that the standard timers at the university would be fine, but that's easy for me to say, since if one was damaged, I'm not responsible. But I would try it, I think the odds are strongly in your favor.
As to the ZoneVI Compensating Timer, or the VarioClock, both are luxuries. I used my VC head for several decades before I found a Compensating Timer on eBay. The ZoneVi and VarioClock timers take advantage of the photo sensor built into the VC head. The "problem" with any VC head is that the light from the two tubes is additive. If you have the blue tube on max, and the green tube off, you will have a certain light output (and a very contrasty print). If you keep the blue tube at max, and turn on the green tube, you lower the contrast, but also have more light output. (Somewhat unlikely settings, but I'm trying to explain what is happening.) The timers which make use of the sensor in the VC head adjust the overall intensity so that the amount of light emitted is constant, regardless of the mix of the two tubes.
In practice this means that as you work through the iterations involved in making a print with a standard timer, you have one more variable, the light output from the head. But in practice I never found this to be a big deal, since VC paper also changes its speed as you change grades. So if you find your base exposure, and make small adjustments to contrast, in my experience you don't have to compensate. If you decide that your base exposure is a couple of grades off, i.e. you need to make big changes in the settings of "hard" and "soft," you probably have to tweak your exposure times. (In most cases, setting the hard and soft potentiometers to the same setting, say "F," gives you somewhere around a grade 2 or 2.5, which for properly exposed negatives is about right. You normally aren't making big contrast changes from that starting point. Similarly, if you know your negative is very thin, you would pick a starting point with more contrast, etc. But again, as you gain experience with matching grades to settings, you find you are not making huge changes once you have a base exposure you like.)
I just realized that I'm being too wordy. Here is a great chart on VC settings vs. grades:
http://www.bnimages.com/files/zonevicontrast.pdf
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