BERKELEY, Calif. — The class is called symplectic geometry, a high-level course in mathematics that provides elite graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, a better understanding of, among other things, planetary motion.

But whether symplectic geometry will meet for its scheduled session on Tuesday is still up in the air because the professor, Katrin Wehrheim, is one of dozens of faculty members who announced they would boycott classes ahead of appearances by right-wing speakers this week.

In the latest round of Berkeley’s free speech wars, the student group that invited the right-wing speakers canceled the event on Saturday. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the writer and professional provocateur of liberal campuses, said he would come anyway.

So, for students across campus, time normally devoted to studying Shakespeare or quantum physics is being spent discussing such things as how many hundreds of police officers the university might deploy to keep the peace.