In practical terms, the university will not contact you of its own volition unless your actions have noticeable negative impacts on other users - whether you are ignorant of it or acting maliciously. Torrenting under normal circumstances will not have a negative impact on other network users. Your neighbors would certainly graciously appreciate that you not do so on the wifi. (Being the constant source of congestion on wifi, which torrenting may cause, may actually make the network team ask you to change your behavior.)
The university will (and are most certainly required to by law) pass notifications of copyright infringement on to you that it receives from copyright holders (ie, the copyright quiz, fines, and eventual banning from the university network. I'm not actually familiar with what the university does, these are just what I've heard.). The university doing this is actually preferable in most cases, as an alternative would be for the university to give the copyright holder your information. Then instead of the university policy office contacting you, you would be contacted by the attorney of the copyright holder...
Now, does the university KNOW you're torrenting before they get a copyright infringement complaint from the rights holder? Almost certainly yes. (In that your torrent connections were logged and stored. The likelihood that an actual human is proactively looking at those logs and acting on them is fairly slim. The logging is done so that the university can know who to contact when it receives a complaint from a copyright holder.) Traffic analysis and packet inspection appliances are inexpensive and scarily capable, so the university employs them like any other large enterprise network would. I don't know what the policy is, but it is actually practical that the university could store the source and destination IP of every connection, the amount of bandwidth consumed in either direction, and how long the connection lasted. The only thing really dictating how much is stored, and for how long, is the policy. You're free to read through them here.
The simple answer is to use a VPN like https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/.
It should be noted that the above is based mostly on common sense and a general understanding of enterprise networking in higher education. I do not deal with any issues of this nature directly. But, let this serve as notice that a lot of the folks that do are also redditors...
tl;dr: The university doesn't "catch" you, copyright holders do. The university, being the bro it is, doesn't turn you over to their lawyers and deals with you internally. Use a VPN, and don't use the wifi.
