BERKELEY, Calif. – At this campus’s living memorial to the Free Speech Movement, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, the cries heard most often these days are “Cappuccino!” and “Chai!”

That may not be exactly the speech that the protest’s leaders were seeking to vindicate four decades ago, when they engaged in a standoff with police that culminated in a sit-in and strike involving more than 10,000 students.

The Free Speech Movement Cafe, which was set up several years ago with a gift from a wealthy Berkeley alumnus, is just one indication of the student movement’s gradual transition from the angry opposition to the establishment.

On Friday, veterans of the student crusade will re-enact the initial 32-hour demonstration that followed the arrest of a young activist for violating a university rule against political organizing on campus.

In 1964, thousands of students surrounded the police car that was preparing to haul away the violator. This time, the police are providing a police cruiser for the movement’s commemoration.

“It’s a perfect example of how institutionalized it’s become,” said one of the movement’s leaders, Jo Freeman.

The photographs of that protest, which show students reading demands from atop a police car, came to symbolize the early days of student activism in America.

“The Free Speech Movement was not the beginning of campus activism in the 1960s, but it did mark a vast escalation,” said Ms. Freeman, who was a 19-year-old Berkeley senior at the time. “It motivated students all over the country to question authority.”

Ms. Freeman, who is now an author, said young people do not understand the degree to which the protests challenged the social mores of the day.

“Standing up to the administration was considered to violate every norm for students,” she said. “It undermined in loco parentis as the governing philosophy of American higher education.”

Time has taken a toll on many of those who played key roles in the standoff. The student who became the movement’s spokesman, Mario Savio, died in 1996.The president of the University of California during the protests, Clark Kerr, died last year. The best-known living veteran of the movement is one of America’s top chefs, Alice Waters, who runs Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Several celebrities of the left, such as former presidential candidate Howard Dean and New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, are scheduled to address the reunion.

The university’s current administration is welcoming back the former troublemakers. However, a handful of academics here remain sharply critical of the activists.

“They continually violated agreements,” a professor of public policy, Martin Trow, complained in an interview. “The university tried to negotiate, but their demands really rose and rose,” said the professor, who is 78.

Much of the lingering bitterness appears to surround the students’ interaction with Mr. Kerr, who is revered by many academics for his efforts to build the University of California into a world-class educational system.

“Kerr was no conservative at all, except he was a 19th century man. He had old-fashioned values,” Mr. Trow said. He said Kerr was flummoxed by the methods and language used by the demonstrators. At one point, the university president accused the students of having ties to Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, though he later retreated from that claim.

“One great tactic was sheer incivility,” Mr. Trow said. “We forget how fashionable it was to be rhetorically violent in those days.”

A sociology professor who negotiated with the students, Nathan Glazer, recalled the time as chaotic and a bit scary. “It was a little bit like the Russian Revolution. Every day something happened,” Mr. Glazer said.

According to Mr. Glazer, Kerr feared that allowing political activity on campus would cause a backlash. “He thought that bringing these issues of advocacy to the campus, changing the rules, would result in a counterattack from the right against the university,” said Mr. Glazer, who left Berkeley for Harvard in 1968. “In retrospect, their initial demands do not seem in any way outrageous, but there were political issues of what would come next.”

Mr. Glazer said he was initially sympathetic with the student activists but became disillusioned with them over time.

“There was too much glee in their attack on authority and in showing up authority,” Mr. Glazer said. “I felt students at the University of California, attending almost free, had a very good deal and they could make a few concessions, a few arrangements with the university.”

In December 1964, the university capitulated, agreeing to allow any speech or political activity that would be considered constitutional off-campus.

While the students won that battle, their victory had some unintended con sequences.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan won election as governor of California on a platform that included a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He later forced Kerr’s firing.

“My own view is the best thing that came out of the Free Speech Movement was the election of Ronald Reagan,” said Mr. Trow, who described himself as a Humphrey-Jackson Democrat. “You can draw a straight line between the Free Speech Movement and the fall of the Berlin Wall. How’s that for irony?”

Mr. Trow also asserted that the protesters made a questionable claim of common cause with the civil rights movement. “They wanted to make the students into the white Negro, downtrodden and so forth. It’s awfully hard to do if you come to the Berkeley campus,” he said.

The former activists disputed that assessment. They said the students involved in the early protests were lobbying to promote local civil rights work when the university suddenly decided to prohibit such outreach.

“We had those rights at the beginning. They gave lesser rights back and we kept pressing for what was at the core of the matter,” said a member of the movement’s steering committee, Michael Rossman, 64.