Why not quote the larger context:
"In 1997, K. Robert Schwarz equated serialism with the "advanced" music Babbitt described in his article, and added, "By the 1960s, the Serialists commanded intellectual prestige and held influential academic posts. All they lacked was a public. In fact, mainstream audiences disliked their work, preferring the music of traditionalists who retained links with tonality: Copland, Barber, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Britten. In academic circles, those composers were sneered at, viewed as expendable fossils from a bygone age" (Schwarz 1997). Nine years later, Walter Simmons echoed Schwarz's belief, and named in addition to Barber, Nicolas Flagello, Ernest Bloch, Howard Hanson, Paul Creston, and Vittorio Giannini as victims of "a de facto blacklisting of composers who failed to conform to the approved [i.e., pro-modernist] version of music history", and cites Babbit's article as epitomizing "the contemptuous attitude of Modernist composers" (Simmons 2006, 5-6). In a review of Simmons's book, however, David Nicholls disagreed, referring to Simmons's contention as a "conspiracy theory" and attributing the disregard of the composers he cites to their "artistic limitations" (Nicholls 2007, 704 and 706). Another interpretation was proposed by Joseph N. Straus (1999). Straus conducted a research study that considered six questions about American compositional activity from the 1950s and 1960s: (1) who controlled the academy? (2) whose music got published? (3) whose music got performed? (4) whose music got recorded? (5) who got the prizes, awards, and fellowships? (6) whose music got reviewed? From this evidence the author concluded, "As the period drew to a close, the American academy was dominated, as it had been throughout the 1950s and 1960s, by tonally oriented composers" (Straus 1999, 307)."
Otherwise, it suggests that Straus was stating an unchallenged truth, when it just seems to be his interpretation. I would be interested in seeing the details that back up the claim. And, of course, tonality itself is not the entirety of the issue. (Also, why limit the "study" to an American context, as if the US role in any form of classical music has ever been all that substantial?)