University of Kelaniya
The University of Kelaniya (UoK; , ) is a public university in Sri Lanka. Just outside the municipal limits of Colombo, in the city of Kelaniya, the university has two major institutions and seven faculties. History The University of Kelaniya has its origin in the historic Vidyalankara Pirivena, founded in 1875 by Ratmalane Sri Dharmaloka Thera as a centre of learning for Buddhist monks. With the establishment of modern universities in Sri Lanka in the 1940s and 1950s, the Vidyalankara Pirivena became the Vidyalankara University in 1959, later the Vidyalankara Campus of the University of Ceylon in 1972, and, ultimately, the University of Kelaniya in 1978. The University of Kelaniya has pioneered a number of new developments in higher education. It was one of the first universities to begin teaching science in Sinhala and the first to restructure the traditional Arts Faculty into three faculties: Humanities, Social Sciences, and Commerce and Management. It has several departments not generally found in the Sri Lankan University system and some Kelaniya innovations have been adopted subsequently by other universities. These include the Departments of Industrial Management and Microbiology in the Faculty of Science; Departments of Linguistics, Fine Arts, Modern Languages and Hindi in