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soccerchamp et al - You're paying $70 a semester for some bandwidth. That's only a little more than what I pay per month for the internet I have. Paying a fee entitles you only to what the provider is offering for the fee, nothing more or less than that.
I have no idea what the typical college network topology is like, but I think that a major concern is that people in their dorms using the internet recreationally are taking up a fair bit of bandwidth. Give them too much and you won't have enough for things like research, or as has been stated you'll have a small group of people running p2p or other bandwidth-intensive applications and filling the pipe, leaving nothing left for everyone else. Bandwidth is always a limited commodity and when you're serving it to as many people as you are on a college campus controlling that traffic and keeping it usable for everyone involved becomes a major concern. So yeah, I think it's only fair to use traffic shaping in order to throttle down a lot of stuff and given that many/most p2p programs (the primary concern here) use non-standard ports it's understandable that occasionally some other app will kept caught up in it.
I don't think censoring is what needs to happen, just controlling the traffic and keeping everything running smoothly. An office sysadmin has every right to outright block certain types of traffic (I'd even go so far as to say he's not doing his job if he doesn't) and a college sysadmin has every right to throttle types of traffic. The environments aren't identical, but they are closely related.
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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said
- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame
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