Ken Mehlman, Franklin & Marshall College Trustee and Board Vice Chair, is paving the way for future Diplomats to lead and perform at the highest level. With a $500,000 gift from Mehlman, F&M will develop and pilot a new Leadership & Performance Lab during the current academic year. The Lab will ultimately equip students with essential skills in leadership, entrepreneurship, high performance and civic engagement.

The Leadership & Performance Lab at F&M will bring together faculty, staff, alumni, Lancaster community partners and expertise in performance science to further develop F&M students as leaders across sectors. Student fellows will benefit from focused mentorship and professional development opportunities, including opportunities to connect with leaders in the Lancaster community, F&M’s alumni network, and experts in the growth mindset and optimizing performance.

“The future requires leaders who are innovators and collaborators. People who are resilient and creative in the face of difficult conditions. We need leaders who can bridge differences in values, beliefs, and lived experience. Preparing these leaders will be at the heart of the work of the Leadership and Performance Lab,” said F&M President Andrew Rich. “I am enormously grateful to Ken for his gift, and I am excited to work with him and our campus community to develop this exciting initiative.”

A Commitment to Preparing Leaders

Mehlman, a partner at global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), is widely recognized for his leadership in government, business and philanthropy. He rose to national prominence as the White House political director and campaign manager for the 2004 presidential re-election campaign of George W. Bush and as chair of the Republican National Committee. In addition to his role as an F&M Trustee, he has served on the boards of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Teach for America, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity and Mount Sinai Hospital of New York. His philanthropic support for Franklin & Marshall includes a previous gift to establish the Mehlman Talent Initiative, a mentorship and financial aid program designed to support high-achieving and high-need undergraduate students who experienced significant obstacles on their journeys to F&M. 

He credits Franklin & Marshall with providing outstanding academic and leadership experiences that shaped his career, specifically noting the impact of Stanley Michalak, the late Honorable John C. and Mrs. Kunkel Professorship in Government. It was the challenging environment created by Professor Michalak that taught him to prepare for adversity and to believe in his own ability to surpass expectations. Mehlman also credits his involvement in Phi Kappa Tau as offering him early leadership lessons.

“Stan Michalak was a Socratic teacher who would call on people unexpectedly… he was the reason that when I showed up at Harvard Law School and there were Socratic professors, I was ready,” he recalled. “Ten years later when I was running the Bush campaign and on national television interviews every day, even the toughest reporter was a walk in the park compared to Stan. I couldn’t prepare enough for his classes, practicing answers to potential questions in front of the mirror. I had learned that confidence and performance in facing the hardest tasks comes from how much you practice.”

“At the end of the day, a huge component of high performance in whatever you do — in the classroom, in athletics, in theater — is pushing yourself outside the comfort zone and taking risks. If you do a little bit more every single day, then it’s incredible what you can achieve.”

— Ken Mehlman ’88, Franklin & Marshall College Trustee and Board Vice Chair

The Leadership & Performance Lab at F&M

The Leadership & Performance Lab will serve as a hub where students apply classroom learning to real-world contexts. With a focus on risk-taking, resilience and innovation, the Lab will introduce strategies for civic engagement, foster civil discourse and encourage collaboration across differences.

In the Lab, Mehlman also sees an opportunity to tap into what he calls a unique aspect of the F&M experience: a campus environment where every student is a participant in their own journey, and sitting on the sidelines as a passive observer isn’t an option.

“F&M is a place where people play. You don’t just watch — you engage in the classroom, you appear on the stage. As an athlete you don’t sit on the bench — you’re at work on the field, on the court or on the mat,” noted Mehlman. “And because our faculty, coaches and competitors challenge us, you learn to play hard. In real life, those who can play hard are rewarded. If you learn at an early age how to play hard, you’re going to have a huge advantage in whatever you do next.”

The Lab will leverage F&M’s powerful academic curriculum and exceptional faculty and staff as advisors to this work as well as the unique perspectives and backgrounds of F&M’s global student body as participants in the shared learning experiment. 

“Some of the best performers in life are people who, early in their lives, learned to do hard things and deal with very challenging circumstances. They’ve learned coping, adapting, rebounding — incredibly important in life. The highest performers I know are people who are great at rebounding; they have a growth mindset, and they appreciate that Ws and Ls are not wins and losses, but wins and lessons,” Mehlman said.

Mehlman is excited about the prospects for the Lab to be a catalyst for students who are preparing to lead in complex times: “At the end of the day, a huge component of high performance in whatever you do — in the classroom, in athletics, in theater — is pushing yourself outside the comfort zone and taking risks. If you do a little bit more every single day, then it’s incredible what you can achieve.”