Well, I've never been to Hongo Campus of Tokyo University during spring, so I don't know whether the rumor is true or not. However, I often hear that Hongo campus very beautiful during autumn - which means that the trees there are dominated by Gingko or Maple - and not Sakura.
True or not, here's what I heard regarding the rumor. The first president of Tokyo University wanted to make the campus a conducing place for study, thus he tried to eliminate places that can be used for romantic rendezvous. And since the pink sakura is often closely related to romance, oops, the tree should also be 'banished' from the campus... :-)
I've tried to check in the internet about the fact, but I can't found any (either in Japanese nor English), so if you ever heard about it, please let me know... :-)
In contrary, TITech is very famous for its sakura - there's even a slope called ロマン坂 (romansaka - slope of romance) in TITech, where one side of the slope is adorned with sakura trees - so I think the president of TITech didn't bother at all about that romance stuff. Well, on the second thought, he didn't need to worry about it, since most of the TITech students are boys... :-) (But that's no problem at all. You can always invite girls to have hanami at TITech... ;-) )
Anyway, I'm glad that I went to TITech...
