Chapman University
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40 free Chapman University trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Chapman University has travelled further than most campuses. It began in the 1860s in a small Northern California town, changed its name and its address several times, and only settled in Orange in 1954. Along the way it picked up a citrus magnate as its namesake, a mascot with an unlikely origin and a campus dotted with pieces of world history. This quiz gathers the best fun facts about Chapman University in one place. Expect questions on the school's founding and early years, the well-known filmmakers, comedians, actors and athletes who studied there, the scholars on its faculty, and the landmarks and traditions that students walk past every day. It is written for students, alumni, families planning a visit and anyone who enjoys college trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn the backstory even when you guess wrong.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Netflix hit was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, 2007 graduates of Chapman University's film school?
Stranger Things
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.
Q 02The college that became Chapman University timed its 1861 opening to the hour of which president's inauguration?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 03Which civil rights leader spoke at Chapman College's Memorial Hall in December 1961?
Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
Q 04A slab of which landmark, shipped to Orange in 1997, stands in a pond in Chapman University's Liberty Plaza?
The Berlin Wall
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.
Q 05Chapman University's film studios are named for a daughter of the couple who founded which California theme park?
Knott's Berry Farm
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.
Q 06Which Tennessee-born host of public television's California's Gold left his episode archives to Chapman University?
Huell Howser
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.
Q 07Since 2014, a Chapman University survey has asked a national sample of Americans to rate dozens of their what?
Fears
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.
Q 08Leslie Jones, who attended Chapman University on a basketball scholarship, later spent five seasons on which show?
Saturday Night Live
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.
Q 09Jodie Sweetin enrolled at Chapman University four years after which sitcom, where she played Stephanie Tanner, ended?
Full House
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.
Q 10Chapman University says a 'modern' coral paint job on its 1950s campus dried to the shade of which drugstore remedy?
Pepto-Bismol
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.
Q 11Bob Einstein, a 1965 Chapman College graduate, created and played which satirical stuntman character on television?
Super Dave Osborne
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.
Q 12Hannah Einbinder, once of Chapman University's improv team, won an Emmy as comedy writer Ava Daniels on which series?
Hacks
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.
Q 13Which 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks was shot in Old Towne Orange, a few blocks from Chapman University?
That Thing You Do!
Q 21Which sport did Chapman University drop after 1932 and not play again until 1994, a gap of 62 years?
Football
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.
Q 22Before its 1954 move to Orange, Chapman College spent more than three decades based in which California city?
Los Angeles
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.
Q 23During World War II, Chapman College rented its entire Vermont Avenue campus to which branch of the armed forces?
The U.S. Navy
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.
Q 14Chapman College All-American Randy Jones won which honor in 1976 with the San Diego Padres?
Cy Young Award
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.
Q 15Chapman University screenwriting graduate Roger Craig Smith became the English voice of which video game hero in 2010?
Sonic
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.
Q 16Bill Kroyer, later head of digital arts at Chapman University, was a main animator on the CGI scenes of which film?
Tron
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.
Q 17Parker Finn, who earned a screenwriting MFA at Chapman University in 2011, wrote and directed which 2022 horror hit?
Smile
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.
Q 18Cooper Hefner, a 2015 Chapman University graduate, became chief creative officer of which brand his father founded?
Playboy
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.
Q 19Chapman University communications graduate Joanna Rosholm served as press secretary to which First Lady?
Michelle Obama
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.
Q 20Justin Simien drew on his own years as a Chapman University film student to write which 2014 campus satire?
Dear White People
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.
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.
Q 24Which shipboard study program, then called World Campus Afloat, did Chapman College sponsor from 1965 to 1975?
Semester at Sea
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.
Q 25Which Protestant denomination, whose members prized educational freedom, founded the forerunner of Chapman University?
Disciples of Christ
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.
Q 26What kind of institution occupied Chapman University's campus in Orange before the college moved there in 1954?
A high school
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.
Q 27Chapman University's original panther mascot, a papier-mâché figure from the mid-1920s, began life as what?
A silent film prop
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.
Q 28C. C. Chapman, the benefactor Chapman University is named for, served as the first mayor of which Orange County city?
Fullerton
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.
Q 29Under which name did Chapman University begin life in 1861, decades before it honored its chief benefactor?
Hesperian College
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.
Q 30In which town about 15 miles from Sacramento did the college that became Chapman University open in 1861?
Woodland
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.