Toward an Ideal Relational Ethic:

his article argues for the importance of developing a relational ethic to guide university-community engagement practices and processes. Our objective is to demonstrate that ethical ‘engagement bridges ’ can be formed to link higher education institutions (HEIs), human capital at the community level, and the important global questions of our day that resonate with regional communities. Taking centre place in this triad is the notion of being-for, an ideal form of togetherness put forward by Zygmunt Bauman (1995) in his early work on globalisation and post-modernity. Being-for is presented in this article as a moral aspiration that, if embraced, can tie together engagement scholarship with the development of enterprising human capital, and result in ethical outcomes in the university-community engagement arena. Our premise is that modern day tertiary education institutions