The "stuttering ineptitudes" uttered by the (presumably encyclopaedic) university when asked to articulate its raison d'être

Wikipedia

"In an instructive irony, the very institutions that claim to provide an arena for sophisticated debate about important questions, issue nothing but 'stuttering ineptitudes' when asked to describe the nature, goal, and unified parts of the university itself."

     Thomas S. Hibbs, channeling Alasdair McIntyre, Three rival versions of moral inquiry:  encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition, being the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 221.  "The research university in crisis (again):  MacIntyre's God, philosophy, universities," Nova et vetera:  the English edition of the international theological journal 9, no. 1 (Fall 2011):  951 (947-966).  MacIntyre:

It is precisely because universities have not been . . . places ['where rival and antagonistic views of rational justification, such as those of genealogists and Thomists, are afforded the opportunity both to develop their own enquiries, in practice and in the articulation of the theory of that practice, and to conduct their intellectual and moral warfare'] and have in fact organized enquiry through institutions and genres well designed to prevent them and to protect them from being such places that the official responses of both the appointed leaders and the working members of university communities to their recent external critics have been so lamentable.  How did this come about?  The central features of the history have all already been noted. . . . It is a history with three stages [(222)].