Mario Savio on the steps of Sproul Hall, 1964

Police violence against Occupy Wall Street protesters reached a new level late last week when campus police at the University of California, Berkeley truncheoned 70-year-old poet Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the United States, and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman. It started, Hass explains in a New York Times commentary, when he went down to the campus, where he teaches poetry and poetics, because a colleague had told him students had been “beaten viciously” by police there and he didn’t believe it.

But standing at the foot of the dramatic swoop of steps fronting Sproul Hall, the very place where the Free Speech Movement headed by Mario Savio was founded fifty years ago, Hass found reason to believe when a cop knocked his wife to the ground as she spoke to him of nonviolence. Speaking to students, the two had abruptly found themselves surrounded by a cordon of police:

It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears … The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children ..

… I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm.

It was, by Hass’ description, a chaotic scene, where “none of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning,” and where, because of the way police had penned them in, “We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to …”

Nor were Hass and Hillman the only prominent, and not-so-young poets and educators pummeled by police in the melee: Other reports note that his colleague Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “was savagely beaten by baton-wielding police, and suffered multiple rib fractures,” while Hass notes another colleague, noted Wordsworth scholar Celeste Langan, “got dragged across the grass by her hair” by police. (A video of the incident — see below — has “stoked outrage among faculty and legal experts,” says a Bay Citizen report.)

Some things never change. As the great Mario Savio said on the steps of Sproul Hall in 1964,

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.