When I was an undergrad, for whatever reason Univers was the default typeface used for computer document production (much of which was done using the Scribe markup language), and as a result, tons of lengthy documents were printed in Univers, including a lot of stuff that was book-length. [Why it was Univers I'm not sure. I don't think they had very many fonts though.]
It was absolutely dreadful: reading page after page of text set in Univers was downright exhausting.
I think Univers is not such a bad typeface in the abstract, but because of the way it was used, I came to loathe it (and right now looking at some Univers examples on the web, I still feel a twinge of disgust...!).
After I had been there a few years, other document production systems (such as TeX), and newer printing technology (like the Laserwriter I with PostScript!) came into use, and the number of supported fonts increased. Many people shifted to serif fonts for their documents, which was a huge relief...