Erik and Kris Hagerman: A tale of two seniors
Erik and Kristof Hagerman are twins. They are often mistaken for each other - by those who don't know them very well. But their differences run deep.
For instance, they disagree about a summer they spent together in New York City internships. Kris: "I had a great time in New York. I really enjoyed myself." Erik: "I couldn't stand it. It's artificial."
Their differences are not confined to their feelings about New York City. In fact, a curious thing happens when they discuss topics like the fraternity system or their plans for the future - they very quickly begin to look not at all like each other.
"At first, when I didn't know them well, I'd say hello to one on campus and it was the other. I couldn't tell them apart," says history professor Gene Garthwaite. But since he has had Erik in his Islamic history course, Garthwaite says that "they don't look at all alike."
Erik and Kris came to Dartmouth four years ago from a small town in Ohio. They had already distinguished themselves as valedictorian and salutatorian of their graduating high school class of 250, and both were prominent on the cross-country team.
In high school, the similarities between the two were much more striking than the differences that have emerged since then. They were in the same classes, they both ran cross-country, they had the same friends and the same interests, and they shared the same bedroom at home, studying on opposite ends of the same desk for the same tests on which they scored nearly identical grades. Comparison and competition were unavoidable. "We didn't want to see each other," says Kris. Tensions ran high from such a close relationship. "We were at each other's throats. We weren't physically abusive, it was just verbal abuse. It was terrible. We drove our parents bananas. Absolutely bananas." At one point Erik nearly went away to a private school.
When it came time to look at colleges, Kris explains, "We didn't want to go to the same school at all."
"But we wanted to get out of town for school," adds Erik. Kris nods in agreement. Despite the fact that they ended up at the same Ivy League school, "Coming to Dartmouth felt great. People didn't know I had a twin," says Kris.
They began to develop individual styles their very first term on campus. They turned over new leaves beginning with their dorm assignments Kris lived in Ripley during freshman year and Erik was in Brewster. "It wasn't like we were competing any more except on the track team, which just didn't make a big deal any more," says Kris. But while Kris was enjoying his new-found freedom, Erik had a harder time of it at first.
"I couldn't really find a niche for a while," says Erik. "Most of freshman year was pretty dismal for me. I went to some parties but I just didn't enjoy them at all. Fraternity parties are so bizarre. You go there and the music is too loud to meet anybody, especially if you're a freshman and look like you're 14 years old like we did as freshmen."
"I had a lot more fun than Erik did," says Kris, who in contrast to his brother, rushed a fraternity, Alpha Delta, during freshman spring. "I got a lot of guff from Erik when I did it," recalls Kris.
Erik, in the meantime, spent his time studying, taking a variety of courses that appealed to his curiosity. "I was struck by the fact that he was doing very high quality work," says Garthwaite, "more characteristic of graduate students."
Thinking back on the pressure this growing reputation was having on him, Erik says, "Sophomore spring I pulled a fourpoint with three citations, and I figured there's nowhere to go but down from here. I started rooming with Frank Powers, who's also on the cross-country track team, and after that things started looking up. It's kind of been a hyperbolic curve since then."
Erik started spending time at the Sigma Phi Epsilon house, where many of the runners on his team lived, and he was surprised by their friendliness and openness to a non-member. "All my best times have just been hanging out with the brothers on the lawn," he says. "They were really cool about it. That's a kind of impressive thing when you think about it. When they can just let people who aren't members hang out there. It's a lot less uptight than a lot of places. I think things get so fishbowl around here you tend to forget things like that."
Although Kris was no slouch in academics, he decided his grade-point average "wasn't the only thing." He became a Russian major and spent a summer in Leningrad. "It was just a really great thing," he says enthusiastically. "It changed a whole lot. I spent the next three months traveling around Europe by myself."
The skills he learned fending for himself in far-off places came in handy when both he and Erik accepted internships in New York City last year. Kris went to work for Mobil Oil, commuting to mid-town Manhattan for his job. After work he was free to "see what was going on," and he eagerly sought out theater, opera, music, and dance just as aggressively as he had in Europe. "It sounds highbrow, but I hadn't seen these things before," says Kris, who tends to attack situations with directness.
Erik, on the other hand, was working for Time, Inc., and not getting home until late, when he'd have just enough time for a run in the park. He missed Dartmouth's quiet rolling hills. "I'd go running at nine-thirty or ten o'clock at night in the park and if you think hard enough you can imagine that you're in a pseudo-rural setting."
His senior year, Erik became a member of the varsity cross-country team. Kris, on the other hand, had to stop running because of a series of injuries that hampered his performance as well as his enjoyment of the sport. "I loved it when I was healthy and could race." Instead, he became more involved in the Dartmouth Outing Club and learned to downhill and cross-country ski, among other things. Kris also became the student intern in President McLaughlin's office.
"He's wonderful," says Mona Chamberlain, assistant to the president, pointing to Kris's enthusiasm and his positive attitude as two of his most outstanding qualities. Over the past year, he has met with prospective students, arranged meetings, drafted letters, briefed the president, and served as a liaison between the student body and President McLaughlin.
Erik - for some time "something of a hermit here," as he puts it - recently decided to join a fraternity after all. His choice, Theta Delta Chi, surprised his parents, as well as many of his friends. "It's primarily for the more violent football players," he says, well aware that he does not fit the stereotype. But, he says, "the degree to which the brothers there have taken me in and made me feel a part of things is really pretty remarkable ... I really insist on the fact that [Theta Delta Chi] is a profoundly misunderstood place," he says. "It was something to be done as a lark."
He continues, changing the frame of reference to the tumultuous events on campus during the past year. "I think the thing that has been lost in the political run-around this year is a sense of humor around this campus. I don't want to denigrate the things that have gone on, because I think some of them are vastly important and something that this place needs a lot the reexamination of a lot of values and issues that are really important but somewhere everybody became fantastically serious."
Kris picks up the thread. "I think it helped," he says, referring to the moratorium on classes and the discussion of diversity that resulted from the destruction of Shantytown. "I think a lot of people had no idea people felt some things."
Asked how those events had affected their last year here, both were quick to say that it had been a positive experience. "The extent to which people have described this as a negative experience is more a product of the media than anything," Erik contends. "Some people compared it to a Pandora's box where everything flew out and the whole place is in tatters now. I thought it was really a positive thing."
Both value the diversity they have encountered at Dartmouth intellectually as well as socially. "I look at problems from so many different angles now," say Kris. "And I think it's a lot easier to go across established social and extracurricular lines here than it is at some other places. You get accepted here a lot quicker."
Kris and Erik are much changed since they first came to Dartmouth. One important person who has noticed is Vin Lananna, head coach of the men's crosscountry track team. He has watched them grow taller and heavier and also more mature over the past four years. "It's so easy now to see that they are two very different individuals. They have had an incredible growth, not only physically but in emotional maturity."
Ironically, they have capped their years at Dartmouth during which they developed as individuals with a pair of remarkably similar accomplishments. Both have won prestigious scholarships for graduate study in England. Erik is one of only 30 students nationwide to receive a Marshall scholarship, and he plans to spend the next two to three years at Oxford University in Islamic studies. And Kris has been awarded a Reynolds Scholarship for graduate work at Cambridge University in international relations. Both are uncertain about their long-range plans, although Kris admits that he is fascinated by business, while Erik says that he wants to travel to places he's never seen.
"The thing I like least about being a twin is the whole implicit vaudevillian aspect of it," complains Erik. "Two guys in their striped suits shuffling off together."
Looking back at their troubled years before Dartmouth, when they competed with each other in every conceivable way, Kris speaks for both of them when he says, "We can't believe how selfish we were. Tunnel vision. If that happened now, we would say, 'I'll forget how I feel for a second.' " It is then that one can see the successful making of two very special and different adults.
Having a double meant toil and trouble for twins Erik (left) and Kris Hagerman in htghschool. But during their four years in Hanover they took divergent paths that establishedthem clearly as two uniquely different people.
Lee McDavid is the assistant' editor of Vox of Dartmouth, the weekly campus newsletter.
