 Priestley and his fellow Unitarians gave the Observations a central place in the curriculum in the dissenting academies. (For admission to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, a student had to subscribe to the doctrines of the Church of England—a requirement which excluded Unitarians, who did not accept that Jesus is God; hence the dissenters’ need for their own institutions of higher learning.) From one report, we learn that students in one academy studied it for two hours every morning. In addition, in the late 1700s student radicals at Cambridge and Oxford also had their copies.