Oh man, my first university used Univers (and not just Univers, the condensed version) for all their signage and handouts as well.
I almost feel like with a font like Univers the similarities between letters could saturate out your pattern recognition quite easily (imagine looking at these same stems and bowls all day long), and that perhaps serifs (or at very least, differing lettershapes) add a much-needed bit of stochastic resonance to the whole process. Maybe the uniformity of modernist typefaces isn't all it cracked up to be. </idle speculation>
I almost feel like with a font like Univers the similarities between letters could saturate out your pattern recognition quite easily (imagine looking at these same stems and bowls all day long), and that perhaps serifs (or at very least, differing lettershapes) add a much-needed bit of stochastic resonance to the whole process. Maybe the uniformity of modernist typefaces isn't all it cracked up to be. </idle speculation>
An exaggerated example of what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/Ypwtm.png
(I wish I had a Discrete Fourier Transform plugin for Photoshop so I could try it with these two examples)