you would need to turn off HTML processing for vbulletin posts for that specific forum, or for the whole board. When VB sees a '<' it assumes that it's an html command, and if your board has html parsed in the post, then you won't see those <> tags.
or search for a hack that does the same thing as [code]The "
Code:
" bbcode here does...
It just might save you some hassle.