Confiding in friends that you will soon be flying Spirit Airlines tends to elicit the same response as if you had just confessed to putting your parents in a home. I’m so sorry people say, wincing sympathetically and patting your arm to let you know that this eventuality, while unavoidable, is surely bleak. Like chicken pox, it seems, everyone has endured Spirit once. I did 13 times last fall.

I teach at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and for my fall class, I found myself commuting once a week from New York City. Spirit offered the last flight out of LaGuardia on Friday nights and the soonest return flight after my Saturday class was done. This, in addition to the fact that I feel obliged to be frugal on the university’s dime, made choosing Spirit an advisable choice, if not necessarily an attractive one.

What convinced me was the opportunity for a little academic intrigue. For almost a decade now I’ve taught classes in business ethics, and Spirit is renowned for imparting lessons in that study, albeit, like Enron and Donald Trump, by negative example. From the outrageous (earning a record fine for consumer protection violations), to the odious (employing a “strippermobile” for one of its ad campaigns), to the merely absurd (offering frequent flyer miles for horror stories from passengers), Spirit Airlines has repeatedly broken new ground for bad business behavior, no place more so than in its startling approach to customer service.

In 2013, Skytrax, an air-travel consultancy, downgraded its rating of Spirit to make it the nation’s only two-star carrier. The distinction reflects “a poor standard of Product and/or poor and inconsistent standards of Staff Service delivery,” placing Spirit in a colorful group of carriers that includes national airlines for failed states, like Syrianair and Yemenia, as well as Indonesia’s Merpati Nusantara Airlines, which suspended service last February when 50 of its 178 pilots resigned after not having been paid for a quarter.

The downgrade by Skytrax coincided with a five-year period when Spirit led all major U.S. airlines in the number of complaints filed with the Department of Transportation. Between 2009 and 2013, passengers on Spirit were nearly three times as likely to file a complaint as passengers on any other airline, and more remarkable yet, each year the volume of complaints grew. By the fall of last year, the Spirit experience had become so notorious among travelers that a Time online poll found that, by a small margin, respondents preferred the possibility of “snakes on a plane” to abiding it.