Provost Gary Miller says WSU is already a force in the networking world and will become much bigger. He said Pendse's Cisco research center will become to the information world what WSU's National Institute for Aviation Research has become for global aviation.

Cisco's interest in Pendse began a little over a decade ago when top company officers including Joe Pinto began noticing that some of the bright young workers they were hiring came from electrical engineering classrooms at a university in a place some people knew little about: Wichita, Kansas.

One day, as Pendse tells it, Pinto - now a senior Cisco vice president - talked to Pendse on the phone, praised the quality of his students, and told him, like any polite person would, to drop in on Cisco sometime if Pendse was ever in town.

Pendse said this was years ago when he was a young teacher, a native of India not entirely familiar with American politeness or culture.

"I thought the guy from Cisco actually meant it," he said. "So I bought a plane ticket and went out there and showed up in Joe Pinto's lobby. And his secretary asked if I had an appointment. I said I didn't know I needed one, that Joe Pinto asked me to come see him.

"We've been close friends ever since," he said.

He made the whole WSU campus go wireless, something that bothered some faculty. Some faculty like students to work on Internet-connected laptops in classrooms; other teachers told him they worried whether students working on the Internet during class would fail to pay attention to lectures.

"Maybe this means you should study the interest level of your lectures and try to make them more interesting," he suggested.