Introducing Linux To Small CS Departments?

Erik Anderson asks: "I am a senior in the Computer Science program at a relatively small (2500 students) liberal arts college. Finally, after much pushing, we (the students) are going to be allowed to install Linux on one of the workstations in the advanced computing lab, and I have been chosen to install/maintain/admin/etc the box. What suggestions or advice would you have for distributions and/or software? This workstation will have some flavor of X installed, and will be used by many students. Disk quotas will need to be enforced and system security and data protection will be of utmost importance. This computer will be primarily used for network experimentation by the students and software development."