If former SGA President Aaron Kraus were an animal, he would be a puppy.
His tail would wag feverishly and his tongue would stand guard outside his mouth. He would command a crowd and be popular among many people.
Many people would also be allergic to him, and his incessant barking would engender as much resentment as reverence.
Aaron Kraus has been an animal this year, pleasing some people and pissing on others. He has done some things and said a whole lot more, and Kraus has left his mark.
People tell a lot of stories about Aaron Reiner Kraus, and he will be happy to share with you a bunch more.
There is the one about his getting pulled out of the shower during his freshman year and being forced by his roommate and friend to say hello to everyone in his dorm while in the buff.
There is the one about him doing a phone interview live on C-SPAN while in bed wearing only his boxers.
And then there is the one about his playing a role to bring alumna Mariah Carey back to his high school for a televised performance.
The stories started March 12, 1983, when Kraus was born in Huntington, N.Y. His parents divorced when he was 2, leaving Kraus to spend his childhood shuttling between Long Island, where his mom worked as a high school art teacher, and Greenwich Village, where his dad owned an ad agency.
“It was definitely a unique experience growing up in the city,” he said. “It made me more independent.”
Politics tempted him as early as eighth grade, when he contemplated running for school president. But Mary DeLuca proved too formidable an opponent.
“Running against the hot girl, that’s hard to do,” he said.
Kraus found his courage in high school and defeated DeLuca his freshman year by handing out Blow Pops. He went on to win class president his sophomore, junior and senior years, primarily by promising to raise enough money to keep prom prices down.
He raised more than $10,000. Prom tickets were $25.
Kraus’ high school success afforded him entry into every school to which he applied: American University, George Washington University, State University of New York at Albany, University of Delaware, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Pittsburgh and University of Maryland. He chose this university without hesitation; his brother, Ethan, had come here four years earlier.
Kraus joined Alpha Sigma Phi, the fraternity his brother founded, during his first semester. The rest of his freshman year was filled with debauchery with his hallmates on the south side of the fifth floor of Cumberland Hall. They called their part of the floor the Dirty South.
“I’d give up a lot for another week of freshman year,” he said.
His roommate that year, Graham Dunn, said Kraus hooked up with one or two girls a night during the first few weeks of freshman year.
“Girls loved him,” Dunn, a senior government and politics major, said. “I never understood it. I would look at him and I’d be like ‘How is he bringing girls back to the room?’”
After his freshman year, Kraus began his pattern of seeking an ends everyone likes through a means only he likes. He worked as a counselor at a summer camp in New York. When he realized his peers were being underpaid, Kraus tried to unionize the counselors.
He was fired.
Kraus ran for the SGA presidency his sophomore year and lost to Tim Daly, 52 percent to 48 percent.
“I’m very happy I lost,” he said. “I didn’t know nearly enough.”
Kraus spent the year participating in the University Student Judiciary, as an orientation adviser and tending to his studies. That year he took a government and politics class by his favorite professor, Jim Glass.
“I think Aaron is a good student,” Glass said. “He has an inquiring mind, he’s enthusiastic, he’s curious, he listens to other students. He was always a dynamo in discussion, but he never dominated discussion.”
Kraus was elected president at the end of his junior year. The 5-foot-6-inch, 126-pound politician had gone from running a country and a city in computer games as a kid to representing a student body 25,000 strong.
The victory, which Dunn said Kraus had predicted during his freshman year, flipped his world upside-down.
He made three AOL Instant Messenger screen names — aaros, aaros22 and aaros44 — to fit the nearly 600 buddies he suddenly had on his buddy list. He spent 306 hours on his cell phone over the last year talking to everyone from Gov. Bob Ehrlich to his grandmother Rose.
Kraus worked 40 to 50 hours a week as president. His first major act — his three-day hunger strike in Annapolis to raise awareness for higher education — garnered national media attention. The project of which he is most proud — the 1,000-person November rally on McKeldin Mall for higher education awareness — also brought him significant ink in the press.
Kraus, who shaves his boyish face once a week, admits to being fond of the press. In the corner of his room is a pile of his press clippings.
“My mom would kill me if I didn’t keep them,” he said.
SGA President Andrew Rose, who served as Kraus’ Vice President for Administrative Affairs, has another view.
“I think that he liked to see his name in the paper and it played off on people like that,” Rose said.
Rose said that while there is nothing wrong with promoting the student government through the media, he plans to not do that or anything else Kraus did this year.
“I’m not just going to go out of my way to piss people off or just to get my way,” he said.
Kraus is used to criticism. Dunn says he thinks Kraus has been ribbed his whole life. One time Dunn messily ate powdered doughnuts in the room he shared with Kraus, who Dunn described as a neat freak.
“I think he let a lot of it roll off his back,” Dunn said. “I think his whole life he’s just been picked on. He’s the kind of kid you can do things to and he’ll just bounce back.”
One posting to an article on the Diamondback website about Kraus trying to reform Dining Services suggests that he kill himself. Kraus has read the message but had grown thick skin by that point.
“If you’re not getting criticism, it probably means you’re not doing anything,” he said.
Though he is no longer in office, Kraus slips frequently, including himself as still part of the SGA. He will have lunch Monday with Ehrlich, but after that, Kraus’ schedule is wide open. Not that he actually has a schedule, though; Kraus claims to arrange all his activities in his head.
This summer he will live in South Campus Commons and then move to the same apartment complex as Daly. A government and politics major with a 3.3 GPA, Kraus doesn’t know what he’ll do next year, or any time after that. He would rather be governor of Maryland than president of the United States, that much he knows, but besides that, he only hopes to use his experience as SGA president as a springboard for a future in public policy.
“The experience was a privilege and 99 percent of the time a complete pleasure,” he said. “Life moves on.”
