I'd guess if a researcher has to use P2P there's probably a way for them to get the data / get whitelisted. I'm pretty sure the "P2P is banned" is mostly aimed at download copyright infringing content.
It's more than copyright infringement. Once you start having a few students or researcher deploying P2P, it's going to saturate the dedicated 10 Gb links very quickly.
P2P will consume any amount of upload bandwidth available. It's horrendous to have inside your network, as a university or research center.
It's not much different than any other service, if you don't limit it or use in moderation it'll saturate the network. If someone would host some linux ISO's over http like some universities do for Linux distributions it'll have the same effect.
You could limit upload to be inside the network. P2p is not horrendous to have inside your network, it can save you a lot of download-link if people inside the network share files with each other.
Torrents are the most effective, reliable and convenient way to distribute large files, its adoption shouldn't be blocked by bad configuration and policies.
