Professional Grant Writer and Contributing Editor

Mr. Chapman holds the distinction of being the only person to take every course offered by Cambridge and never actually to have graduated.  He received his Associate’s degree from Fairfield Junior College in Crossgrove, Illinois, in 1994, and then went on to join its faculty, where he is renown for his studies in Educational Philosophy and Toxicology.  In his most widely recognized experiment, he concluded that, whereas it is true that children learn better when a teacher has fewer students, when the student to teacher ratio drops below one, learning becomes negligible.

And, of course, who hasn’t benefitted from Mr. Chapman’s pre-graduate school landmark research that concluded cold beer inherently tastes better when you’re on a tropical beach?  That, in turn, became the foundation of undoubtedly one of his most controversial claims, that women truly do become more sexually attractive with increased alcoholic consumption, either on their part or on the part of the observer.  Mandrake, along with his other projects, is currently seeking to procure grant money to prove this assertion.

As a pure scientist, though, Mandrake is less concerned with the actual utility of his findings than the process of scientific inquiry.  To him, it is a need to know.

Says Mandrake, “It’s not so much writing the grants as implementing them.  Some studies can take up to ten years to implement.  And, of course, there’s a stipend.  It’s not an easy job.  It does require a lot of travel.  For instance, in proving that students truly learn more if their regular teacher actually submits lesson plans to a substitute while he or she is gone, it was necessary to determine if there was a difference in the quality of the lesson plans that were submitted if they were written at various altitudes, like the Swiss Alps, or at sea level, such as Tahiti.  A good grant will allow for travel.”

Mandrake is currently compiling an oral history of why people hate their jobs in an attempt to prove his hypotheseis that it is because actual work is loathsome.  As well, he is continuing his ongoing project of recording The History of the Future.