40 Fun Facts About Chapman University

Which Netflix hit was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, 2007 graduates of Chapman University's film school?

Stranger Things made the Duffer brothers famous years after the film schools at NYU and USC turned them down, which is how two twins from North Carolina ended up studying at Chapman.

The college that became Chapman University timed its 1861 opening to the hour of which president's inauguration?

Abraham Lincoln took the oath on March 4, 1861, and the founders had put off opening for months to share the date, a statement of their belief in equality on the brink of the Civil War.

Which civil rights leader spoke at Chapman College's Memorial Hall in December 1961?

Martin Luther King Jr. came as an Artist Lecture Series speaker on December 10, 1961, and talked about nonviolence, the Freedom Riders and school desegregation.

A slab of which landmark, shipped to Orange in 1997, stands in a pond in Chapman University's Liberty Plaza?

The Berlin Wall fragment was one of the last pieces still to be had, and it reached campus after four weeks by crane, ship, truck and train with its Cold War graffiti intact.

Chapman University's film studios are named for a daughter of the couple who founded which California theme park?

Knott's Berry Farm founders Walter and Cordelia Knott were her parents, and Marion Knott gave so generously to Chapman's film department that the school named its studios after her.

Which Tennessee-born host of public television's California's Gold left his episode archives to Chapman University?

Huell Howser gave Chapman his videotapes in 2011 and went on to donate nearly everything he owned, including a home built on a volcanic cinder cone in the Mojave Desert.

Since 2014, a Chapman University survey has asked a national sample of Americans to rate dozens of their what?

Fears are the whole subject of the Chapman Survey of American Fears, which students help write and analyse and which has been cited in over 1,000 print, broadcast and online media.

Leslie Jones, who attended Chapman University on a basketball scholarship, later spent five seasons on which show?

Saturday Night Live hired her in 2014, almost three decades after she followed her basketball coach from Chapman to Colorado State when he took the head-coaching job there.

Jodie Sweetin enrolled at Chapman University four years after which sitcom, where she played Stephanie Tanner, ended?

Full House wrapped in 1995, when Sweetin was 13, and she came back as a grown-up Stephanie two decades later in the Netflix sequel Fuller House.

Chapman University says a 'modern' coral paint job on its 1950s campus dried to the shade of which drugstore remedy?

Pepto-Bismol pink was the unhappy result of a facelift meant to spruce up the college's new home in Orange County, and the paint job, luckily, was only temporary.

Bob Einstein, a 1965 Chapman College graduate, created and played which satirical stuntman character on television?

Super Dave Osborne was not his only famous face: Einstein also played Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and his younger brother is the comedian Albert Brooks.

Hannah Einbinder, once of Chapman University's improv team, won an Emmy as comedy writer Ava Daniels on which series?

Hacks earned Einbinder her first Emmy in 2025, and it was at Chapman that she first tried stand-up, opening a campus show for Nicole Byer.

Which 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks was shot in Old Towne Orange, a few blocks from Chapman University?

That Thing You Do! used the historic district as a stand-in for 1960s Erie, Pennsylvania, and its turn-of-the-century storefronts also turn up in countless Chapman student projects.

Chapman College All-American Randy Jones won which honor in 1976 with the San Diego Padres?

The Cy Young Award made Jones the first Padre to win it, a year after he finished second in the voting; at Chapman he had won 27 games and been named an All-American.

Chapman University screenwriting graduate Roger Craig Smith became the English voice of which video game hero in 2010?

Sonic had two official English voices before Smith, who has also played Ezio in Assassin's Creed, Chris Redfield in Resident Evil and Batman in Arkham Origins.

Bill Kroyer, later head of digital arts at Chapman University, was a main animator on the CGI scenes of which film?

Tron persuaded Kroyer to stay in computer animation instead of going back to drawing by hand, and a decade after the 1982 Disney film he directed FernGully: The Last Rainforest.

Parker Finn, who earned a screenwriting MFA at Chapman University in 2011, wrote and directed which 2022 horror hit?

Smile grew out of his short film Laura Hasn't Slept, shot on a Chapman soundstage, and went on to gross over $217 million worldwide.

Cooper Hefner, a 2015 Chapman University graduate, became chief creative officer of which brand his father founded?

Playboy gave him the post in July 2016, when Hugh Hefner stepped down from it, and Cooper later came back to Chapman to teach and to sit on its board of governors.

Chapman University communications graduate Joanna Rosholm served as press secretary to which First Lady?

Michelle Obama made Rosholm her press secretary in January 2014, and the graduate, who grew up in nearby Tustin, stayed in the job until the end of the administration.

Justin Simien drew on his own years as a Chapman University film student to write which 2014 campus satire?

Dear White People won Simien a breakthrough-talent prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was later adapted into a Netflix series of the same name.

Which sport did Chapman University drop after 1932 and not play again until 1994, a gap of 62 years?

Football returned with a distinction: Chapman became, at the time, the only four-year university in Orange County with an NCAA team in the sport.

Before its 1954 move to Orange, Chapman College spent more than three decades based in which California city?

Los Angeles was home from 1920, and after the war returning students so swamped the campus that Quonset huts went up on the lawn, which sent the college looking for more room.

During World War II, Chapman College rented its entire Vermont Avenue campus to which branch of the armed forces?

The U.S. Navy had the campus for the duration, while Chapman kept on one faculty member and a handful of students, who took up lodgings at Whittier College for three years.

Which shipboard study program, then called World Campus Afloat, did Chapman College sponsor from 1965 to 1975?

Semester at Sea sailed with Chapman as its academic sponsor aboard liners such as the SS Ryndam until money troubles, made worse by the oil crisis, ended the tie.

Which Protestant denomination, whose members prized educational freedom, founded the forerunner of Chapman University?

Disciples of Christ approved the new college in June 1860 and insisted that it serve men and women of all races and faiths, a radical idea for the time.

What kind of institution occupied Chapman University's campus in Orange before the college moved there in 1954?

A high school, Orange High, had left the site behind, and when Chapman arrived the town's residents offered students bedrooms and apartments until the college got settled.

Chapman University's original panther mascot, a papier-mâché figure from the mid-1920s, began life as what?

A silent film prop that someone brought to school gave the teams a fiercer image than their old nicknames, the Preachers, the Parsons and the Deacons.

C. C. Chapman, the benefactor Chapman University is named for, served as the first mayor of which Orange County city?

Fullerton elected the Illinois-born former Chicago publisher in 1904, ten years after he came west and bought a citrus grove in Placentia as a hobby.

Under which name did Chapman University begin life in 1861, decades before it honored its chief benefactor?

Hesperian College admitted students regardless of sex or race from its first day, then merged with Pierce Christian College in 1896 and changed names several more times.

In which town about 15 miles from Sacramento did the college that became Chapman University open in 1861?

Woodland was the school's first home, chosen at a time when California had no public education system to speak of and the founders set out to fill the gap.

Which Buchenwald survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner dedicated Chapman's Holocaust memorial library in 2005?

Elie Wiesel dedicated the library sixty years after his liberation, and from 2010 he came back for a week each year as a presidential fellow to meet students.

Which American architect's work inspired the look of Chapman University's Keck Center for Science and Engineering?

Frank Lloyd Wright's influence shapes a 140,000-square-foot building that opened in 2018 with 45 research and teaching labs and its own outdoor amphitheater.

Chapman University professor Vernon L. Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in which field for his laboratory experiments?

Economics is the field Smith helped turn into a laboratory science; he founded an institute for it at Chapman in 2008 and donated his Nobel prize to the university the next year.

Emmett Ashford, a 1941 Chapman graduate, broke a Major League Baseball color barrier in 1966 in which role?

Umpire Emmett Ashford worked American League games from 1966 to 1970, a job he set his heart on the day he heard on the radio that Jackie Robinson had broken the color line.

At which level of NCAA sports do the Chapman University Panthers compete as members of the SCIAC conference?

Division III schools award no athletic scholarships, and Chapman's baseball team won that level's national title in 2003 and again in 2019.

Which opera star headlined the 2016 gala that opened Chapman University's Musco Center for the Arts?

Plácido Domingo led the opening cast in a hall tuned by Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician behind Walt Disney Concert Hall, and blessed the stage with a kiss from his fingertips.

Brandman University, Chapman's online offshoot for working adults, joined which state's university system in 2021?

The University of Massachusetts renamed the school UMass Global, and the deal promised Chapman $96 million over ten years for an operation that began with classes on a Marine air base.

Chapman University's film school began in 1996 in a campus building named for which pioneering director?

Cecil B. DeMille's name went on the building in thanks for the support of his granddaughter, CeCe Presley, years before the school moved into studios built for it.

Chapman film professor Martha Coolidge, who made Valley Girl, was the first woman to lead which film industry body?

The Directors Guild of America chose her as its first female president about two decades after her Valley Girl launched the career of Nicolas Cage.

Chapman physicist Yakir Aharonov, co-discoverer of a famous quantum effect, received which U.S. honor in 2010?

The National Medal of Science crowned work that began in 1959, when Aharonov and David Bohm proposed the effect named after them; he had already shared the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1998.