Abstract
Universities have a responsibility to foster human capital, learning, and enterprising outcomes that impact positively on society and the environment within the regional communities in which they are located. In the past these were seen as essential aspects of how universities both contributed to and shaped the public good. This contribution and the ability of universities to be vehicles for critiquing and shaping the public good is currently constrained, however, by a neo-liberal paradigm that preferences rationalism, self-interest and competitiveness, and excludes processes of mutual dialogue and enterprising action by human capital that generates outcomes of meaningful worth for the community. To examine these issues, we discuss the importance of a relational ethic to underpin university engagement; an ethic that is based on Zygmunt Bauman's (1995) forms of togetherness. We propose that an ideal form of togetherness ought to underpin engagement processes and practices to move beyond the dilemmas of conditional funding. At the conclusion a proposed empirical exploration of these ethically-based engagement processes and objectives is outlined.