I couldn’t get my OpenVPN client to add a DNS server that I know the VPN server was telling it about. It turns out that on Xubuntu 16.04 (and all flavors of Ubuntu, probably), you need to supply additional arguments to make it handle the “dhcp-option” information it receives. More specifically, you have to use the –up and –down options to point to an Ubuntu-supplied script that needs to run when the VPN connection goes up and down.
sudo openvpn --config office.ovpn --script-security 2 --up /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf --down /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf