the erection of the library (1870), which for many years had occupied the nave of the chapel.
In 1873, university students voted against university degrees being open to women. However, all faculties were open to women in 1892, and in 1894 the first 20 matriculated females began their studies at the university. Four women graduated in arts by 1898, and by the following year, women made up a quarter of the faculty.
=== The modern university ===
The closing of the quadrangle of Marischal College was completed during the university's quatercentenary in 1906, which was officially opened by Edward VII and Alexandra, and which saw some of the most extravagant celebrations and expressions of civic pride ever demonstrated in Aberdeen. Four days of festivities took place across the city, which included church services, banquets, torchlight processions, and fireworks displays. In all, the cost of the four days of festivities was the modern equivalent of £1.34 million. The ceremony saw the granting of honorary degrees to over a hundred public and academic figures from across the academic world. In an extravagant display of luxury, Lord Strathcona, the then chancellor of the university, spent £8518 in entertaining around 2500 invited guests in a tent specially designed for the occasion. After having received an honorary degree (LLD) in 1905, Thomas Hardy celebrated Aberdeen as 'a university which can claim in my opinion to an exceptional degree that breadth of view & openness of mind that all Universities profess to cultivate, but many stifle'. Hardy wrote a poem for a special number of the student publication, Alma Mater, in celebration of the quatercentenary of the university.'I looked and thought, "All is too gray and cold
To wake my place-enthusiasms of old!"
Till a voice passed: "Behind that granite mien
Lurks the imposing beauty of a Queen."
I looked anew; and saw the radiant form
Of Her who soothes in stress, who steers in storm,
On the grave influence of whose eyes sublime
Men count for the stability of the time'In …
