How to add your university timetable to iCal? Is there a common way to add institutional scheduling information (such as an individual's university course schedule or timetable) to iCal? In what format would it have to be published to be importable into iCal?

In other words, would it be possible for iCal to know what times during the day your availability is set to 'Busy' so that it warns you when creating appointments during those times?
Some schools provide CalDAV links or iCal subscriptions for their events calendars.   Often this will show up as an RSS feed link somewhere on the page that contains the calendar.

You may need to ask this question of the Technology Department folks or whomever manages the events calendar.

Also, if you need to provide access credentials in order to get to the calendar, expect to run into some problems. iCal doesn't know how to do this.