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Reflections from a new member of the Board of Visitors at the Conway School of Nursing, The Catholic University of America
When Dean Marie Nolan first gave me a tour of the new Conway School of Nursing building, I felt something I had not felt at many of the educational institutions I have known across a long career in healthcare, economics, entrepreneurship, and government. It was a sense that the people here were building something whole; an education that forms the whole person, not just the nursing credentials.
The new Conway building itself is breathtaking. While Dean Nolan was walking me through the anatomy laboratories, the simulation suites, and the intensive emergency and critical-care rooms built to mirror the great hospitals; every type of the latest technology, paired with faculty equipped to instruct students in these demanding technical skills. It is, by any measure, a gold-standard nursing educational facility. But what stopped me was not the equipment.
As we moved through the building, Dean Nolan paused at several glassed-in breakout rooms where five or six nursing students were studying together. At each one she would walk up and say, “This is Dr. LaPier, and I am giving him a feel for our culture and our facilities.” I could see immediately how much the students loved her, and how deeply they respected her desire for each of them to become an exceptional nurse and an exceptional person.
Nursing Was Born in the Catholic Church
To a nursing student, this history is not trivia. It is an inheritance and it explains why a Catholic school of nursing is not one option among many, but the return of nursing to its source.
Organized nursing did not begin in a laboratory or a lecture hall. It began at the bedside of the Catholic Church. The Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, founded in the seventh century and often called the world’s oldest continuously operating hospital was staffed for a thousand years by religious sisters who understood the care of the sick as the care of Christ himself. In the sixteenth century, St. Camillus de Lellis, a soldier turned caregiver, founded an order devoted entirely to the sick and dying and placed a red cross on his followers’ habits, centuries before that symbol meant anything else; he is honored today as a patron saint of nurses.
In America, the story is the same. During the Civil War, more than six hundred Catholic sisters nursed the wounded of both armies, so capably that generals on both sides requested them by name. Religious sisters built much of the American hospital system itself, founding hundreds of hospitals that still serve today.
The Conway School of Nursing stands in that unbroken line at The Catholic University of America, the national university of the Catholic Church, founded by Pope Leo XIII and the U.S. bishops in 1887. When a Conway student learns to baptize a dying newborn in the same week she masters fetal monitoring, she is not learning something novel. She is inheriting nursing as it was born; clinical excellence and sacred purpose, fused into a single calling.
What Conway Builds That No One Else Does
The Conway results speak plainly: an undergraduate program ranked among the nation’s best by U.S. News & World Report, first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates around 95 percent, and more Army Nurse Corps Chiefs produced than any other school in the country.
But rankings are downstream of something deeper. So much of contemporary higher education delivers extraordinary technical training and leaves a vacuum at the center. Graduates emerge fluent in technique but adrift on the questions that matter most: What is my purpose? Who am I? Whom do I serve? The Conway School refuses to accept that vacuum. It forms students across every dimension; the intellectual discipline of rigorous nursing science, the practical discipline of demanding clinical training, and, too often missing elsewhere, the spiritual discipline that orders the other two. Its programs are grounded in the dignity of the human person and in Catholic social teaching, which respects life from conception to natural death and calls us to care for the most vulnerable among us. Every patient is recognized as a child of God and treated with expert care, respect, and love.
That is what a center does. It gives technical mastery somewhere to point. And it is why I say, without hesitation, that Conway builds nurses like no institution I have encountered in my career.
The Man Behind the Name
The school carries the name of Bill Conway, the most selfless person I have ever met, a man who, having done extraordinarily well in business, concluded that his purpose was startlingly simple: to help nurses, so that nurses can help others. Spend an hour in his company and you understand why an entire school rises to meet that standard. Knowing people like Bill, and the leaders he has drawn around this school; President Peter Kilpatrick, Dean Nolan, the faculty, my fellow board members, made my decision easy. People listen here. They pursue their own excellence while actively working to help others succeed. In decades of boardrooms, I have rarely seen a leadership culture like it.
Why My Path Leads Here
I earned my Ph.D. at the London School of Economics under mentors such as Professor Leslie Hannah, and I served for seventeen years on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — mentored by Ian MacMillan, one of the most published authors in the history of Harvard Business School Press and the Harvard Business Review — teaching corporate venturing and entrepreneurial value creation with a focus on social entrepreneurship. The signature course I built carried a deliberately provocative subtitle: How to Make $100 Million and Give It Away. Its premise was simple but demanding; that wealth creation and generosity are not opposites; that building an enterprise of real value and using it to lift others up are two halves of the same vocation.
Everything I have done since points toward Conway. As Managing Partner of Pierpont Group, I steward capital toward mission-driven ends. As CEO of Cambridge Health, I lead an institution educating the healthcare workforce and I know how rare Conway’s combination of rigor and soul truly is. As a Johns Hopkins Medicine Sibley Hospital Foundation Trustee, I see healthcare from the governance side: the economics, the workforce shortages, the systems under strain that only well-formed nurse leaders can fix. And as a Knight of the Order of Malta, I have taken up the Order’s ancient charge — tuitio fidei et obsequium pauperum, the defense of the faith and the service of the poor and the sick. The Conway School’s mission maps almost perfectly onto that vow.
What I bring to this Board, then, is the bridge I have walked my whole career: between the business of healthcare and the calling of nursing, between building institutions and forming people, between doing well and giving it all away. Conway’s students already have the right heart. My hope is to help build the platform; the resources, the strategy, the reach — worthy of it.
Nursing Programs on a Trajectory I Have Not Seen Before
The Conway School’s baccalaureate, master’s, Doctor of Nursing Practice, and post-graduate APRN certificate programs are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), and each is on a genuinely upward trajectory:
Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) — a traditional four-year pathway integrating nursing theory with extensive clinical practice across the Washington, D.C., region’s premier health systems.
Accelerated BSN (ABSN) — a rigorous 12-month, post-baccalaureate pathway for those called to nursing as a second degree.
Certificate in Spanish for Healthcare — equipping nurses to meet patients where they are, in the language of those they serve.
Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) — Complex Healthcare Systems Administration, preparing expert clinicians to lead change at the systems level.
Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) — post-bachelor’s and post-master’s pathways, plus a distinctive DNP/MBA joint degree for executive leadership in healthcare.
Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing (Ph.D.) — a research-intensive program forming the nurse scientists, scholars, and deans of the next generation.
Global and Clinical Immersion — study abroad in Australia, Costa Rica, Italy, Ireland, and Peru, and roughly 525 clinical hours at world-class facilities including MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Children’s National, Inova, George Washington University Hospital, Johns Hopkins Medicine Sibley, and Holy Cross.
To the Student Reading This
Let me close by speaking directly to you; the student who chose nursing or is still deciding whether nursing has chosen you.
You are entering the oldest healing profession the Church ever gave the world, at a moment when the world needs it most desperately. Somewhere ahead of you is a patient whose name you do not yet know; a frightened mother, a dying man, a newborn with minutes to live, and when that moment comes, everything will depend on what you were formed to be. Not just what you were trained to do. What you were formed to be.
Choose the place that forms all of you. I have spent my career studying how extraordinary institutions create value, and I joined this Board because I believe the Conway School of Nursing does something almost no institution in America still does: it takes the whole of you seriously; your mind, your hands, and your soul, and it sends you into the world ready to be excellent for someone. Fifteen centuries of Catholic nurses walked into the rooms the world walked out of. At Conway, you take your place in that line. It would be the honor of my tenure to help you get there.
The author is Managing Partner of Pierpont Group and CEO of Cambridge Health. Dr. LaPier holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, an AMP from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a bachelor’s degree from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and is a Babson Entrepreneurship Teaching Fellow. He served on the faculty of the Wharton School for 17 years teaching entrepreneurial value creation with a focus on social entrepreneurship and is a Knight of the Order of Malta. He is a Trustee of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Sibley Hospital Foundation and a new member of the Board of Visitors of the Conway School of Nursing at The Catholic University of America. Learn more at LinkedIn.