Changing DNS server for Python script

Question

I'm writing a script that is going to be run from a server at my University.
The purpose of the script is to check websites and record their HTTP status code and IP-Address. This works fine generally, but I am encountering a problem I have a hard time solving:
When run from my local machine outside the university network, everything works.
When I run the script from inside the network, one particular site is not resolved. For some reason the DNS server at my university can't do the lookup. I have no control over that machine, so I'm looking for a way around it.

Is it possible to change which DNS server the script uses, when written like below? If not, how should I go about this instead?

The relevant code:

import requests
import httplib
import socket

def getresponse(self,*args,**kwargs):
    response = self._old_getresponse(*args,**kwargs)
    if self.sock:
        response.peer = self.sock.getpeername()
    else:
        response.peer = None
    return response


httplib.HTTPConnection._old_getresponse = httplib.HTTPConnection.getresponse
httplib.HTTPConnection.getresponse = getresponse

def check_peer(resp):
    orig_resp = resp.raw._original_response
    if hasattr(orig_resp,'peer'):
        return getattr(orig_resp,'peer')

r = requests.get("http://www.stackoverflow.com")
try:    
    ip = check_peer(r)
except TypeError:
    ip = socket.gethostbyname_ex(site)

Answer 1

Python 'requests' library - define specific DNS? says it is possible, though patching occurs at the urllib level and not at the requests level.