The son of Cleveland Hoadley Dodge and Grace Wainwright Parish, he graduated from Princeton University in 1909.

[1] In 1923 Dodge succeed his father-in-law, Howard Bliss, to become the president of a university in Beirut then known as the Syrian Protestant College.

[2] His great uncle, Reverend David Stuart Dodge, had been one of the first professors to teach at the faculty in the 1860s.

Dorothy Rowntree, the first woman engineering graduate from the University of Glasgow, worked as Bayard Dodge's personal assistant at the university in Beirut.

[3] After his retirement from the presidency in 1948 he continued teaching at several universities.