I've never seen the word 'universal' used as a characteristic of a vessel. The articles I read dealt mostly with fighting ships, which were usually referred to as multipurpose, sometimes multi-mission and multi-role; scientific, research, survey and other types of non-combat vessels were usually referred to as multipurpose. I guess this charactetistic might be applied to icebreakers as well, considering they are actually capable of performing other tasks apart from their primary one.
I'm not an expert in this; my opinion is based only on what I read in magazines and journals related to the marine industry.