>As a first time poster, I'll introduce myself as Mark Haas, Assistant
>Professor of English at Dakota State University.  I am writing to ask you all
>if you would be willing to have a group of students subscribe to this list and
>ask you about the pleasure and pain of maintaining a listserv.

Dear Mark

As a listowner with long and sad experience of letting classes on to my list,
may I suggest that you handle this by setting up a local bulletin board and
having them read there, then sending questions to you for review before passing
them on to the list?  Or set up a distribution list for the class on your
mailer and pass on all messages, again asking that questions be sent to you for
review.

When I permitted entire classes to sign on to my Vietnam War discussion list, I
was swamped with error messages (students typically are allotted very little
disk space and are very bad about clearing out their mail boxes) and the list
was annoyed with extremely silly questions.  I do realize that students are
unlikely to ask a bunch of listowners "What was it like to kill people?" but I
suspect that the members of this list are mostly professionals who use it as
needed and don't have a lot of time for chat.

Lydia Fish
Listowner vwar-l