To hear Mitt Romney tell it, President Barack Obama's three years at Harvard Law School helped turn him into an aloof, big-government-loving radical. "We have a president, who I think is is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps," Romney told an audience in Pennsylvania in April. But if the de facto GOP presidential nominee wants to make educational experiences a focal point of his candidacy, he could be playing with fire.

In an interview with an Iowa radio station five years ago, the former Massachusetts governor acknowledged the influence of a controversial figure from his own schoolboy past—W. Cleon Skousen, the late Mormon historian and tea party hero who taught Romney at Brigham Young University.