War-damaged Kim Il Sung University campus in 1953 Fifty years have past since the foundation of Kim Il Sung University (October 1, 1946.).
The university, covering an area of 1.56 million square meters at the foot of Moran Hill, a scenic spot of Pyongyang, is the first university of the people built in the liberated Korea. It is a center for native cadre training. In the year following Kor ea's liberation from the Japanese imperialist colonial rule the people built the university by themselves and named it after the great leader president Kim Il Sung in order to convey down through generations the undying revolutionary feats he performed fo r the country and people.
The president gave the university on-the-spot guidance on more than 100 occasions and highly important teachings on more than 500 occasions so as to give an elucidation of the mission and duty of the university to perform applied scientific research an d engineering of solid material and technical foundations and ways of realizing them. Though the great leader comrade Kim Jong Il was busy leading the party and state affairs as a whole, he visited the university on 26 occasions on guidance mission and g ave it highly important teachings on more than 1,600 occasions so as to improve the quality of university education and increase its scope and train the students as comprehensively-developed personnel with deep knowledge.
Today the university has become the supreme seat of juche science and a model of universities throughout the country. The number of departments and laboratories of the university increased 8.4 times and that of teachers and researchers 32 times as aga inst the first days of the university.
The university has all facilities necessary for study and living of the teachers and students, including main building with a floor space of 73,500 square meters, building no. 1 with a floor space of 46,000 square meters and building no.2 with a floor space of 52,000 square meters, a science library which can house more than two million books and has 1,200-odd seats reading rooms and research rooms, a gymnasium with a total floor space of 18,000 square meters, a nature museum, a publishing house, a pri nting factory, an optical experimental laboratory and other auxiliary buildings, dormitories, dining halls, a hospital and welfare service establishments.
It has 14 faculties of social and natural sciences, including economics, history, philosophy, mathematics, biology and some 200 departments and laboratories. And it has some 10 institutes of electronic computers, cell engineering, atomic energy, etc. , and a doctoral institute. It has 14 faculties of social and.more than 1,200 persons with academic degrees and titles, including Pak Si Hyong. Jon Yong Sik and other academicians, professors and doctors (nearly 200), and thousands of teachers and scholar s are in charge of education at the university.
Tens of thousands of graduates from the university are playing a pivotal part in the party, state and economic organs and scientific, educational, cultural and military domains.