This news should come as a surprise to no one. Especially if you’ve been paying attention to campus news recently.

Red Alert Politics reports.

Poll shows most millennials fundamentally misunderstand free speech

In the abstract, college students favor free speech. In reality, they stop short because of how social media affects them.

“Seventy-eight percent of college students believe their campuses should strive to create an open environment where they are exposed to many different types of speech and views. Seventy-two percent say that colleges should not restrict political speech even if it upsets or offends certain groups,” Jeffrey Herbst, president of the Newseum, wrote about a Gallup poll commissioned by the Newseum.

That’s the good news. Students realize the importance of political speech and the chilling effect that campus dictates can have on expression. The platitudes about the importance of speech and expression in an open society have sunk in.

However. Students are quick to find exceptions that are uncouth, rude, or degrading. They want to limit those expressions, but they don’t recognize the danger that those limitations pose for the speech they find legitimate.

“We found that today’s college students favor restrictions on free speech when it comes to slurs and language that is deliberately upsetting to some groups. Sixty-nine percent favor limitations on this kind of speech, while 63 percent support policies that restrict the wearing of costumes that stereotype particular groups,” Herbst noted.

That was consistent across race, gender, and political views.

That puts speech protections in a difficult situation. Policies and restrictions are blunt objects used to fix a problem. As has been seen among many cases that involved the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, university efforts to limit slurs have silenced legitimate speech and discussion as well. The latest example is the rise of “Bias Response Teams” which investigate speech protected by the First Amendment, but some students find offensive.