A 76-year-old Bristol student has finally graduated - more than 50 years after he started his PhD. The University of Bristol conferred Dr Nick Axten as a Doctor of Philosophy this week.
He said the 52 year gap since he started his PHD had given him time for “a long, hard think” to get his work right. In 1970 Dr Axten received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship for a PhD in mathematical sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
But after five years he returned to the UK with the PhD unfinished. He said: ““What I was trying to do in the early 70s was exceptionally difficult.
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“Some problems are so great it takes the best part of a lifetime to get your head around them. They need a long hard think. This one has taken me 50 years."
Dr Axten’s research, which he hopes to publish, builds on the ideas he was working on in America five decades ago. It is a new theory for understanding human behaviour based on the values each person holds and he said it has the potential to change our view of behavioural psychology.
Dr Axten came to the University Bristol in 2016 to do an MA in Philosophy, aged 69. He then studied for a PhD in Philosophy at the same university, finishing in 2022 aged 75.
He said : “I have loved being a student again at Bristol University. All of the other philosophy graduate students were around 23, but they accepted me as one of their own.
“They are clever people full of ideas and I loved talking with them – especially at the pub in the afternoon. Doing a PhD is a lot of hard work, but it’s been brilliant,” he added.
His University of Bristol supervisor, Professor Samir Okasha, said: “Nick was an incredibly enthusiastic, energetic and committed student during his time here. “It’s fantastic to see him graduate half a century after he started his original PhD.”
During his varied career Dr Axten has lived all over the UK and was creator and principal author of the school teaching programme ‘Oxford Primary Science’. He and his wife have two children and four grandchildren.
When he started his undergraduate in Leeds in 1967, men wore their hair long and women were wearing miniskirts. Smoking inside university buildings was the norm and personal computers were still sci-fi.
“It was still flower power and there was a revolutionary feel. It was the time of the Vietnam War, Paris, Prague and student sit-ins. Jack Straw was president of the students’ union in Leeds,” he said. "Sociology and psychology were suddenly boom subjects. I went to study them because I wanted to understand people."
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