Boston University yesterday publicly released a plan to spend $1.8 billion to boost salaries and hire top professors in an effort to lower its student-faculty ratio and boost the school’s national ranking over 10 years.

The outline is part of President Robert Brown’s Strategic Plan, marking his first major academic move since he took charge in 2005.

The plan, which was developed by a task force created in summer 2006, had been available to the BU community for months but was yesterday changed into a more descriptive narrative. It details how all professors will see a salary raise and also outlines plans for 100 teachers to be added to the College of Arts and Sciences, 20 to the School of Management and 30 to interdisciplinary studies.

BU will pay for more than $1 billion of the plan, with the rest planned to be covered by gifts and the endowment, which is around $1.1 billion, Brown told The Daily Free Press in an Oct. 10 interview.

The key weakness in the plan is the difficulty of making change with a relatively small endowment, said Douglas Sears, the former dean of the School of Education and chairman of the Strategic Plan task force.

“Part of what we need to do is raise money,” he said. “It’s part of everybody’s job to make the case that [the plan] is university-worthy of support. . . . You don’t raise money because you want money, you do it to improve the university.”

Additional improvements will be made in the College of Fine Arts and in improving student life in general, Sears said.

“We’ve done a narrative that sort of places [the plan] in the historical context of the university,” said Sears, the associate provost and assistant to the president for outreach and special initiatives. “These things set the direction for the future of the university.”

While Sears said the faculty plans have been set for months, it is still important to discuss because it reflects BU’s goal of becoming a more competitive university and lowering student-faculty ratios, from 14 -to-1 to 9-to-1.

“We needed to improve the student-faculty ratios so we make sure our students are being taught by professors who are teaching full-time,” Sears said. “We are always going to be a teaching institution.”

In addition to bringing in scholarly professors, the plan suggests to increase salaries of full-time and assistant professors to compete with peer institutions.

Sears said more professors will be added to CAS and SMG because the schools include key disciplines of medicine, law and management and play a key role in determining a university’s status.

“The essence of the strategy is to emphasize undergraduate education using CAS and SMG as a basis,” he said. “Everybody recognizes those types of schools. It doesn’t mean other schools don’t get improved but . . . it raises the overall level of the university.”

Faculty Council chairwoman Julie Sandell said faculty members were involved with discussions about the plan with Brown, but she does not think the most important part of the plan is the increased salaries.

“There was more discussion about increasing faculty numbers,” she said. “I was surprised that . . . so much emphasis was put on salary, but it was not in my mind the focus of the plan. It was we want to do all of these things to improve the university.

“In my mind, reducing student-faculty ratio . . . is not the main goal,” she continued. “We want to make the most prestigious university. One way to do that is to hire really excellent faculty members and make sure that BU is an institution [professors] want to come to.”

Dorothy Clark, an assistant professor in mass communication, said BU could become a top-30 school in the U.S. News and World Report rankings by adding more high-quality professors.

“I thought it was refreshing for President Brown to be paying attention to faculty in a way that appreciates their contributions and is willing to be supportive both in terms of making academic strides for the university and rewarding them in a variety of ways,” Clark said.

Brown did not respond to requests for comment.

Lisa Davis contributed reporting for this article.