The "fixes" people have been mentioning with respect to bittorrent would work if your problem is the university monitoring your traffic, but it very likely isn't. If anything, the greatest source of risk of you losing your connection is some third-party copyright agency contacting your university claming that you downloaded X file that you don't have the rights to. It's very unlikely that your university would actively monitor and arbitrate what constitues legal and illegal traffic.

Direct download is actually quite safe for your situation, as it becomes much more difficult for said third parties to identify that you downloaded a file when you're not broadcasting your IP address to a swarm of peers trying to download the same file.