DescriptionPublic land-grant universities (PLGUs) have been mandated for nearly a century to fulfill research, teaching, and public service missions by advancing scholarly inquiry that benefits broader society, by ensuring educational access to a broad citizenry, and by providing direct assistance to communities primarily through agricultural cooperative extension services. With the advent of a global service-based economy in recent decades, PLGUs have become involved with tourism planning and development efforts in their communities as forms of education and public service through academic programs and cooperative extension tourism, as well as through conference and event services and through campus-based visitor information centers. PLGU involvement with tourism planning and development signals a trend towards placemaking that coincides with the national university-community engagement movement. This exploratory analysis begins to clarify PLGU involvement with tourism planning and development as an emergent form of university-community engagement. The study finds that predominantly elite PLGUs are promoting their involvement with tourism planning and development as community engagement, thereby advancing themselves as powerful placemakers that help to make their communities more competitive destinations in regional and national place hierarchies. As a consequence, PLGUs that appear to lack capacity to compete in this innovative approach to community engagement also appear to lack placemaking power in their communities. Ultimately, the study asserts that the adoption of community-based tourism engagement marketing strategies among elite PLGUs creates a new playing field on which lower capacity PLGUs and their communities are disadvantaged to compete. Ironically, this practice reinforces the very class and power structures that the university-community engagement movement seeks to address. Using primarily grounded theory, institutional ethnography, and case study methodological approaches, the study identifies and characterizes levels of tourism planning and development capacity among PLGUs on national and regional scales. The study lays groundwork for further research on PLGU tourism planning and development as both a potentially beneficial and potentially disempowering form of university-community engagement.